A BRIDGE TOO FAR
by
CORNELIUS RYAN


Published by: Simon and Schuster, New York, NY. Copyright 1974
by Cornelius Ryan

Now deceased, Cornelius Ryan was born in 1920 in Dublin, Ireland, where
he was raised. He became one of the preeminent war correspondents of
his time, flying fourteen bombing missions with the Eighth and Ninth
U.s. air forces, and covering the D-Day landings and the advance of
General Patton's Third Army across France and Germany. After the end
of hostilities in Europe, he covered the Pacific war. In addition to
his classic works The Longest Day and The Last Battle, he was the
author of numerous books, which have appeared throughout the world in
19 languages. Awarded the Legion of Honor by the French Government in
1973, Mr. Ryan was hailed at that time by Malcolm Muggeridge as
"perhaps the most brilliant reporter now alive." He died in 1976, two
years after the publication of A Bridge Too Far.

By Cornelius Ryan

A BRIDGE TOO FAR--1974

THE LAST BATTLE--1966

THE LONGEST DAY--1959

FOR THEM ALL

On the narrow corridor that would carry the armored drive, there were
five major bridges to take. They had to be seized intact by airborne
assault. It was the fifth, the crucial bridge over the Lower Rhine at
a place called Arnhem, sixty-four miles behind the German lines, that
worried Lieutenant General Frederick Browning, Deputy Commander, First
Allied Airborne Army. Pointing to the Arnhem bridge on the map he
asked, "How long will it take the armor to reach us?" Field Marshal
Montgomery replied briskly, "Two days." Still looking at the map,
Browning said, "We can hold it for four." Then he added, "But, sir, I
think we might be going a bridge too far." The final conference at
Montgomery's Headquarters on Operation Market-Garden, September
10, 1944, as recalled in Major General Roy E. Urquhart's memoirs,
Arnhem.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD Operation Market-Garden, September 17-24, 1944

ONE The Retreat

TWO The Plan

THREE The Attack

FOUR The Siege

FIVE Der Hexenkessel

A Note on Casualties

The Soldiers and Civilians of A Bridge Too Far What They Do
Today ........... 601

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

A BRIDGE TOO FAR

FOREWORD OPERATION MARKET-GARDEN September 17-24, 1944

Shortly after 10 A.m. on Sunday, September 17, 1944, from airfields all
over southern England the greatest armada of troop-carrying aircraft
ever assembled for a single operation took to the air. In this, the
263rd week of World War II, the Supreme Allied Commander, General
Dwight David Eisenhower, unleashed Market-Garden, one of the most
daring and imaginative operations of the war. Surprisingly,
Market-Garden, a combined airborne and ground offensive, was authored
by one of the most cautious of all the Allied commanders, Field Marshal
Bernard Law Montgomery.

Market, the airborne phase of the operation, was monumental: it
involved almost five thousand fighters, bombers, transports and more
than 2500 gliders. That Sunday afternoon, at exactly 1:30 P.m., in an
unprecedented daylight assault, an entire Allied airborne army,
complete with vehicles and equipment, began dropping behind the German
lines. The target for this bold and historic invasion from the sky:
Nazi-occupied Holland.

On the ground, poised along the Dutch-Belgian border, were the Garden
forces, massed tank columns of the British Second Army. At 2:35 P.m.,
preceded by artillery and led by swarms of rocket-firing fighters, the
tanks began a dash up the backbone of Holland along a strategic route
the paratroopers were already fighting to capture and hold open.

Montgomery's ambitious plan was designed to sprint the troops

and tanks through Holland, springboard across the Rhine and into
Germany itself. Operation Market-Garden, Montgomery reasoned, was the
lightning stroke needed to topple the Third Reich and effect the end of
the war in 1944.

Part One 13-15 THE RETREAT

In the thousand-year-old Dutch village of Driel, people listened
intently. Even before dawn, restless sleepers woke and lights came on
behind shuttered windows. Initially there was only a sense of
something unaccountable taking place somewhere beyond the immediate,
physical surroundings. Gradually vague impressions took form. In the
far distance came a muted, continuous mutter.

Barely audible, but persistent, the sound reached the village in waves.
Unable to identify the subtle noise, many listened instinctively for
some change in the flow of the nearby Lower Rhine. In Holland, half of
which lies below sea level, water is the constant enemy, dikes the
major weapon in a never-ending battle that has gone on since before the
eleventh century. Driel, sitting in a great bend of the Lower Rhine,
southwest of Arnhem, capital of Gelderland, has an ever-present
reminder of the struggle. A few hundred yards to the north, protecting
the village and the region from the restless 400-yard-wide river, a
massive dike, topped by a road, rises at places more than twenty feet
high. But this morning the river gave no cause for alarm. The Neder
Rijn swept peacefully toward the North Sea at its customary speed of
two miles per hour. The sounds reverberating off the stone face of the
protective dike came from another, far more ruthless, enemy.

As the sky lightened and the sun began to burn off the mist, the
commotion grew louder. From roads due east of Driel the vil-

lagers could clearly hear the sound of traffic-- traffic that seemed to
grow heavier by the minute. Now their uneasiness turned to alarm, for
there was no doubt about the identity of the movement: in this fifth
year of World War II and after fifty-one months of Nazi occupation,
everyone recognized the rumble of German convoys.

Even more alarming was the size of the procession. Some people later
recalled that only once before had they heard such a flow of
traffic--in May, 1940, when the Germans had invaded the Netherlands.
At that time, swarming across the Reich frontier ten to fifteen miles
from Driel, Hitler's mechanized armies had reached the main highways
and spread swiftly throughout the country. Now, over those same roads
convoys seemed once more to be moving endlessly.

Strange sounds came from the nearest main road --a two-lane highway
connecting Arnhem, on the northern bank of the Lower Rhine, with the
eighth-century city of Nijmegen, on the broad river Waal, eleven miles
to the south. Against the low background throb of engines, people
could plainly identify individual noises which seemed curiously out of
place in a military convoy--the scrape of wagon wheels, the whir of
countless bicycles and the slow, unpaced shuffling of feet.

What kind of convoy could this be? And, more important, where was it
heading? At this moment in the war Holland's future could well depend
on the answer to that question. Most people believed the convoys
carried heavy reinforcements--either pouring into the country to
bolster the German garrison or rushing south to halt the Allied
advance. Allied troops had liberated northern France with spectacular
speed. Now they were fighting in Belgium and were said to be close to
the capital, Brussels, less than one hundred miles away. Rumors
persisted that powerful Allied armored units were driving for the Dutch
border. But no one in Driel could tell for sure exactly the direction
the convoys were taking. Distance and the diffusion of sound made that
impossible. And because of the nightly curfew the villagers were
unable to leave their houses to investigate.

Plagued by uncertainty, they could only wait. They could not know that
shortly before dawn the three young soldiers who constituted little
Driel's entire German garrison had left the village on stolen bicycles
and pedaled off into the mist. There was no longer any military
authority in the village to enforce the curfew regulations.

Unaware, people kept to their homes. But the more curious among them
were too impatient to wait and decided to risk using the telephone. In
her home at 12 Honingveldsestraat, next to her family's
jam-and-preserves factory, young Cora Baltussen called friends in
Arnhem. She could scarcely believe their eyewitness report. The
convoys were not heading south to the western front. On this misty
morning, September 4, 1944, the Germans and their supporters appeared
to be fleeing from Holland, traveling in anything that would move.

The fighting that everyone had expected, Cora thought, would now pass
them by. She was wrong. For the insignificant village of Driel,
untouched until now, the war had only begun.

Fifty miles south, in towns and villages close to the Belgian border,
the Dutch were jubilant. They watched incredulously as the shattered
remnants of Hitler's armies in northern France and Belgium streamed
past their windows. The collapse seemed infectious; besides military
units, thousands of German civilians and Dutch Nazis were pulling out.
And for these fleeing forces all roads seemed to lead to the German
border.

Because the withdrawal began so slowly--a trickle of staff cars

and vehicles crossing the Belgian frontier--few Dutch could tell
exactly when it had started. Some believed the retreat began on
September 2; others, the third. But by the fourth, the movement of the
Germans and their followers had assumed the characteristics of a rout,
a frenzied exodus that reached its peak on September 5, a day later to
be known in Dutch history as Dolle Dinsdag, "Mad Tuesday."

Panic and disorganization seemed to characterize the German flight.
Every kind of conveyance was in use. Thronging the roads from the
Belgian border north to Arnhem and beyond were trucks, buses, staff
cars, half-track vehicles, armored cars, horse-drawn farm carts and
civilian automobiles running on charcoal or wood. Everywhere
throughout the disorderly convoys were swarms of tired, dusty soldiers
on hastily commandeered bicycles.

There were even more bizarre forms of transportation. In the town of
Valkenswaard, a few miles north of the Belgian frontier, people saw
heavily laden German troopers laboriously pushing along on children's
scooters. Sixty miles away, in Arnhem, crowds standing on the
Amsterdamseweg watched as a massive black-and-silver hearse pulled by
two plodding farm horses passed slowly by. Crowded in the casket space
in back were a score of disheveled, exhausted Germans.

Trudging in these wretched convoys were German soldiers from many
units. There were Panzer troops, minus tanks, in their black battle
suits; Luftwaffe men, presumably all that remained of German air force
units that had been shattered in either France or Belgium; Wehrmacht
soldiers from a score of divisions; and Waffen SS troops, their
skull-and-crossbones insignia a macabre identification. Looking at
these apparently leaderless, dazed troops moving aimlessly along, young
Wilhelmina Coppens in St. Oedenrode thought that "most of them had no
idea where they were or even where they were going." Some soldiers, to
the bitter amusement of Dutch bystanders, were so disoriented that they
asked for directions to the German frontier.

In the industrial town of Eindhoven, home of the giant Philips
electrical works, the population had heard the low sound of artillery
fire from Belgium for days. Now, watching the dregs of the beaten
German army thronging the roads, people expected Allied troops to
arrive within hours. So did the Germans. It appeared to Frans Kortie,
twenty-four-year-old employee in the town's finance department, that
these troops had no intention of making a stand. From the nearby
airfield came the roar of explosions as engineers blew up runways,
ammunition dumps, gasoline storage tanks and hangars; and through a
pall of smoke drifting across the town, Kortie saw squads of troops
rapidly working to dismantle heavy antiaircraft guns on the roofs of
the Philips buildings.

All through the area, from Eindhoven north to the city of Nijmegen,
German engineers were hard at work. In the Zuid Willemsvaart Canal
running below the town of Veghel, Cornelis de Visser, an
elementary-school teacher, saw a heavily loaded barge blown skyward,
shooting out airplane engine parts like a deadly rain of shrapnel. Not
far away, in the village of Uden, Johannes de Groot,
forty-five-year-old car-body builder, was watching the retreat with his
family when Germans set fire to a former Dutch barracks barely 300
yards from his home. Minutes later heavy bombs stored in the building
exploded, killing four of de Groot's children, aged five to eighteen.

In places such as Eindhoven, where school buildings were set ablaze,
fire brigades were prevented from operating and whole blocks were
burned down. Still, the sappers, in contrast to the fleeing columns on
the roads, gave evidence of following some definite plan.

The most frantic and confused among the escapees were the civilians,
German, Dutch, Belgian and French Nazis. They got no sympathy from the
Dutch. To farmer Johannes Hulsen at St. Oedenrode, they looked
"scared stiff"; and they had reason to be, he thought with
satisfaction, forwiththe Allies "snapping at their heels these traitors
knew it was Bijltjesdag ["Hatchet Day"]."

The frantic flight of Dutch Nazis and German civilians had been
triggered by the Reichskommissar in Holland, the notorious
fifty-two-year-old Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and by the ambitious

and brutal Dutch Nazi Party leader, Anton Mussert. Nervously watching
the fate of the Germans in France and Belgium, Seyss-Inquart on
September 1 ordered the evacuation of German civilians to the east of
Holland, closer to the Reich border. The fifty-year-old Mussert
followed suit, alerting members of his Dutch Nazi Party. Seyss-Inquart
and Mussert were themselves among the first to leave: they moved from
The Hague east to Apeldoorn, fifteen miles north of Arnhem. * Mussert
rushed his family even closer to the Reich, moving them into the
frontier region at Twente, in the province of Overijssel. At first
most of the German and Dutch civilians moved at a leisurely pace. Then
a sequence of events produced bedlam. On September 3 the British
captured Brussels. The next day Antwerp fell. Now, British tanks and
troops were only miles from the Dutch border. * Seyss-Inquart was
terrified. At Apeldoorn, he took to his underground headquarters--a
massive concrete and brick bunker constructed at a cost of more than
$250,000--complete with conference rooms, communications and personal
suites. It still exists. Scratched on the concrete exterior near the
entrance are the figures "6 1/4," the nickname for the hated
commissioner. The Netherlanders couldn't resist it; in Dutch,
Seyss-Inquart and "6 1/4" sound almost the same--zes en een kwart.

On the heels of these stunning victories, the aged Queen of the
Netherlands, Wilhelmina, told her people in a radio broadcast from
London that liberation was at hand. She announced that her son-in-law,
His Royal Highness Prince Bernhard, had been named Commander in Chief
of the Netherlands Forces and would also assume leadership of all
underground resistance groups. These factions, comprising three
distinct organizations ranging politically from the left to the extreme
right, would now be grouped together and officially known as
Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (forces of the Interior). The
thirty-three-year-old Prince Bernhard, husband of Princess Juliana,
heir to the throne, followed the Queen's announcement with one of his
own. He asked the underground to have armlets ready "displaying in
distinct letters the word "Orange,"" but not to use them "without my
order." He warned them to "refrain in the enthusiasm of the moment
from premature and independent actions, for these would compromise
yourselves and the military operations underway."

Next, a special message was broadcast from General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, confirming that
freedom was imminent. "The hour of liberation the Netherlands have
awaited so long is now very near," he promised. And within a few hours
these broadcasts were followed by the most optimistic statement of all,
from the prime minister of the Dutch government in exile, Pieter S.
Gerbrandy. He told his listeners, "Now that the Allied armies, in
their irresistible advance, have crossed the Netherlands frontier ... I
want all of you to bid our Allies a hearty welcome to our native soil.
..."

The Dutch were hysterical with joy, and the Dutch Nazis fled for their
lives. Anton Mussert had long boasted that his party had more than
50,000 Nazis. If so, it seemed to the Dutch that they all took to the
roads at the same time. In scores of towns and villages all over
Holland, Nazi-appointed mayors and officials suddenly bolted--but often
not before demanding back pay. The mayor of Eindhoven and some of his
officials insisted on their salaries. The town clerk, Gerardus Legius,
thought their posture ridiculous, but he didn't even feel badly about
paying them off. Watching them scurry out of town "on everything with
wheels" he wondered: "How far can they get? Where can they go?" There
was also a run on the banks. When Nicolaas van de Weerd,
twenty-four-year-old bank clerk, got to work in the town of Wageningen
on Monday, September 4, he saw a queue of Dutch Nazis waiting outside
the bank. Once the doors were opened they hurriedly closed accounts
and emptied safety deposit boxes.

Railway stations were overrun by terrified civilians. Trains leaving
for Germany were crammed to capacity. Stepping off a train on its
arrival in Arnhem, young Frans Wiessing was engulfed by a sea of people
fighting to get aboard. So great was the rush that after the train
left, Wiessing saw a mountain of luggage lying abandoned on the
platform. In the village of Zetten, west of Nijmegen, student Paul van
Wely watched as Dutch Nazis crowding the railroad station waited all
day for a Germany-bound train, which never arrived. Women and children
were crying and to Van Wely "the waiting room looked like a junk

store full of tramps." In every town there were similar incidents.
Dutch collaborators fled on anything that would move. Municipal
architect Willem Tiemans, from his office window near the great Arnhem
bridge, watched as Dutch Nazis "scrambled like mad" to get onto a barge
heading up the Rhine for the Reich.

Hour after hour the traffic mounted, and even during darkness it went
on. So desperate were the Germans to reach safety that on the nights
of September 3 and 4, in total disregard of Allied air attacks,
soldiers set up searchlights at some crossroads and many overloaded
vehicles crawled by, headlights blazing. German officers seemed to
have lost control. Dr. Anton Laterveer, a general practitioner in
Arnhem, saw soldiers throwing away rifles--some even tried to sell
their weapons to the Dutch. Joop Muselaars, a teen-ager, watched a
lieutenant attempt to stop a virtually empty army vehicle, but the
driver, ignoring the command, drove on through. Furious, the officer
fired his pistol irrationally into the cobblestones.

Everywhere soldiers tried to desert. In the village of Eerde, Adrianus
Marinus, an eighteen-year-old clerk, noticed a soldier jumping off a
truck. He ran toward a farm and disappeared. Later Marinus learned
that the soldier was a Russian prisoner of war who had been conscripted
into the Wehrmacht. Two miles from Nijmegen, in the village of Lent on
the northern bank of the Waal, Dr. Frans Huygen, while making his
rounds, saw troops begging for civilian clothing, which the villagers
refused. In Nijmegen deserters were not so abject. In many cases they
demanded clothing at gunpoint. The Reverend Wilhelmus Peterse,
forty-year-old Carmelite, saw soldiers hurriedly remove uniforms,
change to suits and set off on foot for the German border. "The
Germans were totally fed up with the war," recalls Garrit Memelink,
Arnhem's Chief Forestry Inspector. "They were doing their damnedest to
evade the military police."

With officers losing control, discipline broke down. Unruly gangs of
soldiers stole horses, wagons, cars and bicycles. Some ordered farmers
at gunpoint to haul them in their wagons toward Germany. All through
the convoys the Dutch saw trucks, farm

wagons, hand carts--even perambulators pushed by fleeing troops--piled
high with loot filched from France, Belgium and Luxembourg. It ranged
from statuary and furniture to lingerie. In Nijmegen soldiers tried to
sell sewing machines, rolls of cloth, paintings, typewriters--and one
soldier even offered a parrot in a large cage.

Among the retreating Germans there was no shortage of alcohol. Barely
five miles from the German border in the town of Groesbeek, Father
Herman Hoek watched horse-drawn carts loaded down with large quantities
of wines and liquors. In Arnhem, the Reverend Reinhold Dijker spotted
boisterous Wehrmacht troops on a truck drinking from a huge vat of wine
which they had apparently brought all the way from France.
Sixteen-year-old Agatha Schulte, daughter of the chief pharmacist of
Arnhem's municipal hospital, was convinced that most of the soldiers
she saw were drunk. They were throwing handfuls of French and Belgian
coins to the youngsters and trying to sell bottles of wine, champagne
and cognac to the adults. Her mother, Hendrina Schulte, vividly
recalls seeing a German truck carrying another kind of booty. It was a
large double bed--and in the bed was a woman. * * "Scenes were
witnessed which nobody would ever have deemed possible in the German
army," writes Walter Goerlitz, the German historian, in his History of
the German General Staff. "Naval troops marched northward without
weapons, selling their spare uniforms ... They told people that the war
was over and they were going home. Lorries loaded with officers, their
mistresses and large quantities of champagne and brandy contrived to
get get back as far as the Rhineland, and it was necessary to set up
special courts-martial to deal with such cases."

Besides the columns straggling up from the south, heavy German and
civilian traffic was coming in from western Holland and the coast. It
flooded through Arnhem and headed east for Germany. In the prosperous
Arnhem suburb of Oosterbeek, Jan Voskuil, a thirty-eight-year-old
chemical engineer, was hiding out at the home of his father-in-law.
Learning that he was on a list of Dutch hostages to be arrested by the
Germans, he had fled from his home in the town of Geldermalsen, twenty
miles away, bringing his wife, Bertha, and their nine-year-old son. He
had arrived in Oosterbeek just in time to see the evacuation. Jan's

father-in-law told him not to "worry anymore about the Germans; you
won't have to "dive" now." Looking down the main street of Oosterbeek,
Voskuil saw "utter confusion." There were dozens of German-filled
trucks, nose-to-tail, "all dangerously overloaded." He saw soldiers
"on bicycles, pedaling furiously, with suitcases and grips looped over
their handlebars." Voskuil was sure that the war would be over in a
matter of days.

In Arnhem itself, Jan Mijnhart, sexton of the Grote Kerk--the massive
fifteenth-century Church of St. Eusebius with a famed 305-foot-high
tower--saw the Moffen (a Dutch nickname for the Germans, equivalent to
the English "Jerry") filing through the town "four abreast in the
direction of Germany." Some looked old and sick. In the nearby
village of Ede an aged German begged young Rudolph van der Aa to notify
his family in Germany that they had met. "I have a bad heart," he
added, "and probably won't live much longer." Lucianus Vroemen, a
teen-ager in Arnhem, noticed the Germans were exhausted and had "no
fighting spirit or pride left." He saw officers trying, with little or
no success, to restore order among the disorganized soldiers. They did
not even react to the Dutch, who were yelling, "Go home! The British
and Americans will be here in a few hours."

Watching the Germans moving east from Arnhem, Dr. Pieter de Graaff,
forty-four-year-old surgeon, was sure he was seeing "the end, the
apparent collapse of the German army." And Suze van Zweden,
high-school mathematics teacher, had a special reason to remember this
day. Her husband, Johan, a respected and well-known sculptor, had been
in Dachau concentration camp since 1942 for hiding Dutch Jews. Now he
might soon be freed, for obviously the war was nearly over. Suze was
determined to witness this historic moment--the departure of the
Germans and the arrival of the Allied liberators. Her son Robert was
too young to realize what was happening but she decided to take her
daughter Sonja, aged nine, into town. As she dressed Sonja, Suze said,
"This is something you have to see. I want you to try and remember it
all your life."

Everywhere the Dutch rejoiced. Dutch flags made their ap-

pearance. Enterprising merchants sold orange buttons and large stocks
of ribbon to the eager crowds. In the village of Renkum there was a
run on the local drapery shop, where manager Johannes Snoek sold orange
ribbon as fast as he could cut it. To his amazement, villagers
fashioned bows then and there and proudly pinned them on. Johannes,
who was a member of the underground, thought "this was going a bit too
far." To protect the villagers from their own excesses, he stopped
selling the ribbon. His sister Maria, caught up in the excitement,
noted happily in her diary that there was "a mood in the streets almost
as though it was Koninginnedag, the Queen's birthday." Cheering crowds
stood on sidewalks yelling, "Long live the Queen!" People sang the
"Wilhelmus" (the Dutch national anthem) and "Oranje Boven!" ("Orange
Above All!"). Cloaks flying, Sisters Antonia Stranzky and Christine
van Dijk from St. Elisabeth's Hospital in Arnhem cycled down to the
main square, the Velperplein, where they joined crowds on the terraces
of caf`es who were sipping coffee and eating potato pancakes as the
Germans and Dutch Nazis streamed by.

At St. Canisius Hospital in Nijmegen, Sister M. Dosith@ee Symons saw
nurses dance with joy in the convent corridors. People brought out
long-hidden radios and, while watching the retreat flood by their
windows, listened openly for the first time in long months to the
special Dutch service, Radio Orange, from London's BBC. So excited by
the broadcasts was fruit grower Joannes Hurkx, in St. Oedenrode, that
he failed to spot a group of Germans back of his house stealing the
family bicycles.

In scores of places schools closed and work came to a halt. Employees
at the cigar factories in Valkenswaard promptly left their machines and
crowded into the streets. Streetcars stopped running in The Hague, the
seat of government. In the capital, Amsterdam, the atmosphere was
tense and unreal. Offices closed, and trading ceased on the stock
exchange. Military units suddenly disappeared from the main
thoroughfares, and the central station was mobbed by Germans and Dutch
Nazis. On the outskirts of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, crowds
carrying flags and flowers stood along main roads leading into the
cities--hoping to be the first to see British tanks coming from the
south.

Rumors grew with every hour. Many in Amsterdam believed that British
troops had already freed The Hague, near the coast about thirty miles
to the southwest. In The Hague people thought the great port of
Rotterdam, fifteen miles away, had been liberated. Rail travelers got
a different story every time their trains stopped. One of them, Henri
Peijnenburg, a twenty-five-year-old resistance leader traveling from
The Hague to his home in Nijmegen, a distance of less than eighty
miles, heard at the beginning of his journey that the British had
entered the ancient border city of Maastricht. In Utrecht he was told
they had reached Roermond. Then, in Arnhem he was assured that the
British had taken Venlo, a few miles from the German border. "When I
finally got home," he recalls, "I expected to see the Allies in the
streets, but all I saw were the retreating Germans." Peijnenburg felt
confused and uneasy.

Others shared his concern--especially the underground high command
meeting secretly in The Hague. To them, tensely watching the
situation, Holland seemed on the threshold of freedom. Allied tanks
could easily slice through the country all the way from the Belgian
border to the Zuider Zee. The underground was certain that the
"gateway"--through Holland, across the Rhine and into Germany--was wide
open.

The resistance leaders knew the Germans had virtually no fighting
forces capable of stopping a determined Allied drive. They were almost
scornful of the one weak and undermanned division composed of old men
guarding coastal defenses (they had been sitting in concrete bunkers
since 1940 without firing a shot), and of a number of other low-grade
troops, whose combat capabilities were extremely doubtful, among them
Dutch SS, scratch garrison troops, convalescents and the medically
unfit--these last grouped into units aptly known as "stomach" and "ear"
battalions, because most of the men suffered from ulcers or were hard
of hearing.

To the Dutch the Allied move seemed obvious, invasion immi-

nent. But its success depended on the speed of British forces driving
from the south, and about this the underground high command was
puzzled: they were unable to determine the precise extent of the Allied
advance.

Checking on the validity of Prime Minister Gerbrandy's statement that
Allied troops had already crossed the frontier was no simple matter.
Holland was small--only about two thirds the size of Ireland--but it
had a dense population of more than nine million, and as a result the
Germans had difficulty controlling subversive activity. There were
underground cells in every town and village. Still, transmitting
information was hazardous. The principal, and most dangerous, method
was the telephone. In an emergency, using complicated circuitry,
secret lines and coded information, resistance leaders could call all
over the country. Thus, on this occasion, underground officials knew
within minutes that Gerbrandy's announcement was premature: British
troops had not crossed the border.

Other Radio Orange broadcasts further compounded the confusion. Twice
in a little more than twelve hours (at 11:45 P.m. on September 4 and
again on the morning of September 5) the Dutch Service of the BBC
announced that the fortress city of Breda, seven miles from the
Dutch-Belgian border, had been liberated. The news spread rapidly.
Illegal, secretly printed newspapers promptly prepared liberation
editions featuring the "fall of Breda." But the Arnhem regional
resistance chief, thirty-eight-year-old Pieter Kruyff, whose group was
one of the nation's most highly skilled and disciplined, seriously
doubted the Radio Orange bulletin. He had his communications expert
Johannes Steinfort, a young telephone-company instrument maker, check
the report. Quickly tying in to a secret circuit connecting him with
the underground in Breda, Steinfort became one of the first to learn
the bitter truth: the city was still in German hands. No one had seen
Allied troops, either American or British.

Because of the spate of rumors, many resistance groups hurriedly met to
discuss what should be done. Although Prince Bernhard and SHAEF
(supreme Headquarters Allied Expedi- nary Forces) had cautioned against
a general uprising, some underground members had run out of patience.
The time had come, they believed, to directly confront the enemy and
thus aid the advancing Allies. It was obvious that the Germans feared
a general revolt. In the retreating columns, the underground noted,
sentries were now sitting on the fenders of vehicles with rifles and
submachine guns at the ready. Undeterred, many resistance men were
eager to fight.

In the village of Ede, a few miles northwest of Oosterbeek,
twenty-five-year-old Menno "Tony" de Nooy tried to persuade the leader
of his group, Bill Wildeboer, to attack. It had long been planned,
Tony argued, that the group should take over Ede in the event of an
Allied invasion. The barracks at Ede, which had been used to train
German marines, were now practically empty. De Nooy wanted to occupy
the buildings. The older Wildeboer, a former sergeant major in the
Dutch Army, disagreed. "I don't trust this situation," he told them.
"The time is not yet ripe. We must wait."

Not all resistance movements were held in check. In Rotterdam,
underground members occupied the offices of the water-supply company.
Just over the Dutch-Belgian border in the village of Axel, the town
hall with its ancient ramparts was seized and hundreds of German
soldiers surrendered to the civilian fighters. In many towns Dutch
Nazi officials were captured as they tried to bolt. West of Arnhem, in
the village of Wolfheze, noted principally for its hospital for the
mentally ill, the district police commissioner was seized in his car.
He was locked up temporarily in the nearest available quarters, the
asylum, for delivery to the British "when they arrived."

These were the exceptions. In general, underground units remained
calm. Yet, everywhere they took advantage of the confusion to prepare
for the arrival of Allied forces. In Arnhem, Charles Labouch@ere,
forty-two, descendant of an old French family and active in an
intelligence unit, was much too busy to bother about rumors. He sat,
hour after hour, by the windows of an office in the neighborhood of the
Arnhem bridge and, with a

number of assistants, watched German units heading east and northeast
along the Zevenaar and Zutphen roads toward Germany. It was
Labouch@ere's job to estimate the number of troops and, where possible,
to identify the units. The vital information he noted down was sent to
Amsterdam by courier and from there via a secret network to London.

In suburban Oosterbeek, young Jan Eijkelhoff, threading his way
unobtrusively through the crowds, cycled all over the area, delivering
forged food ration cards to Dutchmen hiding out from the Germans. And
the leader of one group in Arnhem, fifty-seven-year-old Johannus
Penseel, called "the Old One," reacted in the kind of wily manner that
had made him a legend among his men. He decided the moment had come to
move his arsenal of weapons. Openly, with German troops all about, he
and a few hand-picked assistants calmly drove up in a baker's van to
the Municipal Hospital, where the weapons were hidden. Quickly
wrapping the arms in brown paper they transported the entire cache to
Penseel's home, whose basement windows conveniently overlooked the main
square. Penseel and his coleader, Toon van Daalen, thought it was a
perfect position from which to open fire on the Germans when the time
came. They were determined to live up to the name of their militant
subdivision--Landelyke Knokploegen ("Strong-arm Boys").

Everywhere men and women of the vast underground army poised for
battle; and in southern towns and villages, people who believed that
parts of Holland were already free ran out of their homes to welcome
the liberators. There was a kind of madness in the air, thought
Carmelite Father Tiburtius Noordermeer as he observed the joyful crowds
in the village of Oss, southeast of Nijmegen. He saw people slapping
one another on the back in a congratulatory mood. Comparing the
demoralized Germans on the roads with the jubilant Dutch spectators, he
noted "wild fear on the one hand and crazy, unlimited, joy on the
other." "Nobody," the stolid Dutch priest recalled, "acted
normally."

Many grew more anxious as time passed. In the drugstore on the main
street in Oosterbeek, Karel de Wit was worried. He told

his wife and chief pharmacist, Johanna, that he couldn't understand why
Allied planes had not attacked the German traffic. Frans Schulte, a
retired Dutch major, thought the general enthusiasm was premature.
Although his brother and sister-in-law were overjoyed at what appeared
to be a German debacle, Schulte was not convinced. "Things may get
worse," he warned. "The Germans are far from beaten. If the Allies
try to cross the Rhine, believe me, we may see a major battle."

Hitler's crucial measures were already underway. On September 4 at the
F@uhrer's headquarters deep in the forest of G@orlitz, Rastenburg, East
Prussia, sixty-nine-year-old Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt prepared
to leave for the western front. He had not expected a new command.

Called abruptly out of enforced retirement, Von Rundstedt had been
ordered to Rastenburg four days before. On July 2, two months earlier,
Hitler had fired him as Commander in Chief West (or, as it was known in
German military terms, OB West-- Oberbefehlshaber West) while Von
Rundstedt, who had never lost a battle, was trying to cope with the
aftermath of Germany's greatest crisis of the war, the Allied invasion
of Normandy.

The F@uhrer and Germany's most distinguished soldier had never agreed
on how best to meet that threat. Before the invasion, appealing for
reinforcements, Von Rundstedt had bluntly informed Hitler's
headquarters (Okw--Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) [Armed Forces High
Command] that the Western Allies, superior in men, equipment and
planes, could "land anywhere they want to." Not so, Hitler declared.
The Atlantic Wall, the partly completed coastal

fortifications which, Hitler boasted, ran almost three thousand miles
from Kirkenes (on the Norwegian-Finnish frontier) to the Pyrenees (on
the Franco-Spanish border) would make "this front impregnable against
any enemy." Von Rundstedt knew only too well that the fortifications
were more propaganda than fact. He summed up the Atlantic Wall in one
word: "Humbug."

The legendary Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, renowned for his victories in
the North African deserts in the first years of the war and sent by
Hitler to command Army Group B under Von Rundstedt, was equally
appalled by the F@uhrer's confidence. To Rommel, the coastal defenses
were a "figment of Hitler's Wolkenkuck-kucksheim [cloud cuckoo land]."
The aristocratic, tradition-bound Von Rundstedt and the younger,
ambitious Rommel found themselves, probably for the first time, in
agreement. On another point, however, they clashed. With the crushing
defeat of his Afrika Korps by Britain's Montgomery at El Alamein in
1942 always in his mind, and well aware of what the Allied invasion
would be like, Rommel believed that the invaders must be stopped on the
beaches. Von Rundstedt icily disagreed with his junior--whom he
sarcastically referred to as the "Marschall Bubi" ("Marshal Laddie");
Allied troops should be wiped out after they landed, he contended.
Hitler backed Rommel. On D Day, despite Rommel's brilliant
improvisations, Allied troops breached the "impregnable" wall within
hours.

In the terrible days that followed, overwhelmed by the Allies, who
enjoyed almost total air supremacy over the Normandy battlefield, and
shackled by Hitler's "no withdrawal" orders ("Every man shall fight and
fall where he stands"), Von Rundstedt's straining lines cracked
everywhere. Desperately he plugged the gaps, but hard as his men
fought and counterattacked, the outcome was never seriously in doubt.
Von Rundstedt could neither "drive the invaders into the sea" nor
"annihilate them" (the words were Hitler's).

On the night of July 1, at the height of the Normandy battle, Hitler's
chief of staff, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, called Von Rundstedt and
plaintively asked, "What shall we do?" Character- istically blunt, Von
Rundstedt snapped, "End the war, you fools. What else can you do?"
Hitler's comment on hearing the remark was mild. "The old man has lost
his nerve and can't master the situation any longer. He'll have to
go." Twenty-four hours later, in a polite handwritten note, Hitler
informed Von Rundstedt that, "in consideration of your health and of
the increased exertions to be expected in the near future," he was
relieved of command.

Von Rundstedt, the senior and most dependable field marshal in the
Wehrmacht, was incredulous. For the five years of war his military
genius had served the Third Reich well. In 1939, when Hitler
cold-bloodedly attacked Poland, thereby igniting the conflict that
eventually engulfed the world, Von Rundstedt had clearly demonstrated
the German formula for conquest-- Blitzkrieg ("lightning war")--when
his Panzer spearheads reached the outskirts of Warsaw in less than a
week. One year later, when Hitler turned west and with devastating
speed overwhelmed most of western Europe, Von Rundstedt was in charge
of an entire Panzer army. And in 1941 he was in the forefront again
when Hitler attacked Russia. Now, outraged at the jeopardy to his
career and reputation, Von Rundstedt told his chief of staff, Major
General Gunther Blumentritt, that he had been "dismissed in disgrace by
an amateur strategist." That "Bohemian corporal," he fumed, had used
"my age and ill health as an excuse to relieve me in order to have a
scapegoat." Given a free hand, Von Rundstedt had planned a slow
withdrawal to the German frontier, during which, as he outlined his
plans to Blumentritt, he would have "exacted a terrible price for every
foot of ground given up." But, as he had said to his staff many times,
because of the constant "tutelage from above," about the only authority
he had as OB West was "to change the guard in front of the gate." * *
"Von Rundstedt was hurt by the implication in Hitler's letter that he
had "requested" relief," the late General Blumentritt told me in an
interview. "Some of us at Headquarters actually thought he had, but
this was not so. Von Rundstedt denied that he had ever asked to be
relieved-- or that he had ever thought of doing so. He was extremely
angry--so angry in fact that he swore he would never again take a
command under Hitler. I knew he did not mean it for, to Von Rundstedt,
military obedience was unconditional and absolute."

From the moment of his recall and his arrival at the end of

August at the Rastenburg Wolfsschanze ("Wolf's Lair"), as it was named
by Hitler, Von Rundstedt, at the F@uhrer's invitation, attended the
daily briefing conference. Hitler, according to the Deputy Chief of
Operations General Walter Warlimont, greeted his senior field marshal
warmly, treating him with "unwonted diffidence and respect." Warlimont
also noted that throughout the long sessions Von Rundstedt simply sat
"motionless and monosyllabic." * The precise, practical field marshal
had nothing to say. He was appalled by the situation. * Warlimont,
Inside Hitler's Headquarters, 1939-45, p. 477.

The briefings clearly showed that in the east the Red Army now held a
front more than 1,400 miles long, from Finland in the north to the
Vistula in Poland, and from there to the Carpathian Mountains in
Rumania and Yugoslavia. In fact, Russian armor had reached the borders
of East Prussia, barely a hundred miles from the F@uhrer's
headquarters.

In the west Von Rundstedt saw that his worst fears had been realized.
Division after division was now destroyed, the entire German line
thrown helplessly back. Rear-guard units, although surrounded and cut
off, still clung to vital ports such as Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne, Le
Havre, Brest, Lorient and St. Nazaire, forcing the Allies to continue
bringing supplies in from the distant invasion beaches. But now, with
the sudden, stunning capture of Antwerp, one of Europe's greatest deep
seaports, the Allies might well have solved their supply problem. Von
Rundstedt noted, too, that the tactic of Blitzkrieg, perfected by
himself and others, was being borrowed with devastating effect by
Eisenhower's armies. And Field Marshal Walter Model, the
fifty-four-year-old new Commander in Chief, West (he took over on
August 17), was clearly unable to bring order out of the chaos. His
front had been ripped apart, slashed in the north by tanks of the
British Second Army and the U.s. First Army driving through Belgium
toward Holland; and, south of the Ardennes, armored columns of the U.s.
Third Army under General George S. Patton were heading for Metz and the
Saar. To Von Rundstedt the situation was no longer merely ominous. It
was cataclysmic.

He had time to dwell on the inevitability of the end. Almost four days
elapsed before Hitler allowed Von Rundstedt a private audience. During
his wait the Field Marshal stayed in the former country inn reserved
for senior officers in the center of the vast headquarters--a
barbed-wire-enclosed enclave of wooden huts and concrete bunkers built
over a catacomb of underground installations. Von Rundstedt vented his
impatience at the delay on Keitel, the chief of staff. "Why have I
been sent for?" he demanded. "What sort of game is going on?" Keitel
was unable to tell him. Hitler had given Keitel no particular reason,
short of an innocuous mention of the Field Marshal's health. Hitler
seemed to have convinced himself of his own manufactured version for
Von Rundstedt's dismissal on "health grounds" back in July. To Keitel,
Hitler had merely said, "I want to see if the old man's health has
improved."

Twice Keitel reminded the F@uhrer that the Field Marshal was waiting.
Finally, on the afternoon of September 4, Von Rundstedt was summoned to
Hitler's presence, and, uncharacteristically, the F@uhrer came to the
point immediately. "I would like to entrust you once more with the
western front."

Stiffly erect, both hands on his gold baton, Von Rundstedt merely
nodded. Despite his knowledge and experience, his distaste for Hitler
and the Nazis, Von Rundstedt, in whom the Prussian military tradition
of devotion to service was ingrained, did not decline the appointment.
As he was later to recall, "it would have been useless to protest
anyway." * * According to Walter Goerlitz, editor of The Memoirs of
Field Marshal Keitel (chapter 10, p. 347), Von Rundstedt said to
Hitler, "My F@uhrer, whatever you may command, I will do my duty to my
last breath." My version of Von Rundstedt's reaction is based on the
recollections of his former chief of staff, Major General Blumentritt.
"I said nothing," Von Rundstedt told him. "If I'd opened my mouth,
Hitler would have talked "at me" for three hours."

Almost cursorily, Hitler outlined Von Rundstedt's task. Once more
Hitler was improvising. Before D Day he had insisted that the Atlantic
Wall was invulnerable. Now, to Von Rundstedt's dismay, the F@uhrer
stressed the impregnability of the Westwall--the long-neglected,
unmanned but still formidable frontier fortifications better known to
the Allies as the Siegfried Line.

Von Rundstedt, Hitler ordered, was not only to stop the Allies as far
west as possible, but to counterattack for, as the F@uhrer saw it, the
most dangerous Allied threats were no more than "armored spearheads."
Clearly, however, Hitler was shaken by the capture of Antwerp. Its
vital port was to be denied the Allies at all costs. Thus, since the
other ports were still in German hands, Hitler said, he fully expected
the Allied drive to come to a halt because of overextended supply
lines. He was confident that the western front could be stabilized
and, with the coming of winter, the initiative regained. Hitler
assured Von Rundstedt that he was "not unduly worried about the
situation in the west."

It was a variation of a monologue Von Rundstedt had heard many times in
the past. The Westwall, to Hitler, had now become an id@ee fixe, and
Von Rundstedt once again was being ordered "not to give an inch," and
"to hold under all conditions."

By ordering Von Rundstedt to replace Field Marshal Model, Hitler was
making his third change of command of OB West within two months--from
Von Rundstedt to Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge, to Model, and now
once again to Von Rundstedt. Model, in the job just eighteen days,
would now command only Army Group B under Von Rundstedt, Hitler said.
Von Rundstedt had long regarded Model with less than enthusiasm.
Model, he felt, had not earned his promotion the hard way; he had been
elevated to the rank of field marshal too quickly by Hitler. Von
Rundstedt thought him better suited to the job of a "good regimental
sergeant major." Still, the Field Marshal felt that Model's position
made little difference now. The situation was all but hopeless, defeat
inevitable. On the afternoon of September 4, as he set out for his
headquarters near Koblenz, Von Rundstedt saw nothing to stop the Allies
from invading Germany, crossing the Rhine and ending the war in a
matter of weeks.

On this same day in Wannsee, Berlin, Colonel General Kurt Student,
fifty-four-year-old founder of Germany's airborne forces,

emerged from the backwater to which he had been relegated for three
long years. For him, the war had begun with great promise. His
paratroops, Student felt, had been chiefly responsible for the capture
of Holland in 1940, when some 4,000 of them dropped on the bridges of
Rotterdam, Dordrecht and Moerdijk, holding the vital spans open for the
main German invasion force. Student's losses had been incredibly
low--only 180 men. But the situation was different in the 1941
airborne assault of Crete. There, losses were so high--more than a
third of the 22,000-man force--that Hitler forbade all future airborne
operations. "The day of parachute troops is over," the F@uhrer said,
and the future had dimmed for Student. Ever since, the ambitious
officer had been tied to a desk job as commander of an
airborne-training establishment, while his elite troopers were used
strictly as infantry. With shattering abruptness, at precisely 3 P.m.
on this critical September 4, Student emerged into the mainstream once
again. In a brief telephone call, Colonel General Alfred Jodl,
Hitler's operations chief, ordered him to immediately organize an army,
which the F@uhrer had designated as the "First Parachute Army." As the
astounded Student listened, it occurred to him that "it was a rather
high-sounding title for a force that didn't exist."

Student's troopers were scattered all over Germany, and apart from a
few seasoned, fully equipped units, they were green recruits armed only
with training weapons. His force of about ten thousand had almost no
transportation, armor or artillery. Student didn't even have a chief
of staff.

Nevertheless, Student's men, Jodl explained, were urgently needed in
the west. They were to "close a gigantic hole" between Antwerp and the
area of Li@ege-Maastricht by "holding a line along the Albert Canal."
With all possible speed, Student was ordered to rush his forces to
Holland and Belgium. Weapons and equipment would be issued at the
"railheads of destination." Besides his paratroopers, two divisions
had been earmarked for his new "army." One of them, the 719th, Student
soon learned, was "made up of old men stationed along the Dutch coast
who

had not as yet fired a single shot." His second division, the 176th,
was even worse. It consisted of "semi-invalids and convalescents who,
for convenience, had been grouped together in separate battalions
according to their various ailments." They even had special "diet"
kitchens for those suffering from stomach trouble. Besides these
units, he would get a grab bag of other forces scattered in Holland and
Belgium--Luftwaffe troops, sailors and antiaircraft crews-- and
twenty-five tanks. To Student, the expert in paratroop warfare and
supertrained airborne shock troops, his makeshift army was a "grotesque
improvisation on a grand scale." Still, he was back in the war
again.

All through the afternoon, by telephone and teletype, Student mustered
and moved his men out. It would take at least four days for his entire
force to reach the front, he estimated. But his toughest and best
troops, rushed in special trains to Holland in what Student called a
"blitz move," would be in position on the Albert Canal, as part of
Model's Army Group B, within twenty-four hours.

Jodl's call and the information he himself had since gathered alarmed
Student. It seemed apparent that his most seasoned group--the 6th
Parachute Regiment plus one other battalion, together totaling about
three thousand men--probably constituted the only combat-ready reserve
in the whole of Germany. He found the situation ominous.

Frantically, Field Marshal Walter Model, Commander in Chief, West,
tried to plug the yawning gap east of Antwerp and halt the disorderly
retreat from Belgium into Holland. As yet no news of Von Rundstedt's
appointment as his successor had reached him. His forces were so
entangled, so disorganized that Model had all but lost control. He no
longer had contact with the second half of his command, Army Group G in
the south. Had General Johannes Blaskowitz, its commander,
successfully withdrawn from France?

Model wasn't sure. To the harassed Field Marshal the predicament of
Army Group G was secondary. The crisis was clearly in the north.

With dispatch and ferocity, Army Group B had been split in two by
armored columns of the British and Americans. Of the two armies
composing Army Group B, the Fifteenth was bottled up, its back to the
North Sea, roughly between Calais and a point northwest of Antwerp.
The Seventh Army had been almost destroyed, and thrown back toward
Maastricht and Aachen. Between the two armies lay a 75-mile gap and
the British had driven through it straight to Antwerp. Plunging along
the same route were Model's own demoralized, retreating forces.

In a desperate effort to halt their flight, Model issued an emotional
plea to his troops.

... With the enemy's advance and the withdrawal of our front, several
hundred thousand soldiers are falling back--army, air force and armored
units --troops which must re-form as planned and hold in new strong
points or lines.

In this stream are the remnants of broken units which, for the moment,
have no set objectives and are not even in a position to receive clear
orders. Whenever orderly columns turn off the road to reorganize,
streams of disorganized elements push on. With their wagons move
whispers, rumors, haste, endless disorder and vicious self-interest.
This atmosphere is being brought back to the rear areas, infecting
units still intact and in this moment of extreme tension must be
prevented by the strongest means.

I appeal to your honor as soldiers. We have lost a battle, but I
assure you of this: We will win this war! I cannot tell you more at
the present, although I know that questions are burning on your lips.
Whatever has happened, never lose your faith in the future of Germany.
At the same time you must be aware of the gravity of the situation.
This moment will and should separate men from weaklings. Now every
soldier has the same responsibility. When his commander falls, he must
be ready to step into his shoes and carry on ...

There followed a long series of instructions in which Model
"categorically" demanded that retreating troops should immedi-

ately "report to the nearest command point," instill in others
"confidence, self-reliance, self-control and optimism," and repudiate
"stupid gossip, rumors and irresponsible reports." The enemy, he said,
was "not everywhere at once" and, indeed, "if all the tanks reported by
rumormongers were counted, there would have to be a hundred thousand of
them." He begged his men not to give up important positions or
demolish equipment, weapons or installations "before it is necessary."
The astonishing document wound up by stressing that everything depended
on "gaining time, which the F@uhrer needs to put new weapons and new
troops into operation."

Virtually without communications, depending for the most part on radio,
Model could only hope that his Order of the Day reached all his troops.
In the confusion he was not even sure of the latest position of his
disorganized and shattered units; nor did he know precisely how far
Allied tanks and troops had advanced. And where was the Schwerpunkt
(main thrust) of the Allied drive--with the British and Americans in
the north heading for the Siegfried Line and thence across the Rhine
and into the Ruhr? Was it with Patton's massive U.s. Third Army
driving for the Saar, the Siegfried Line and over the Rhine into
Frankfurt?

Model's dilemma was the outgrowth of a situation that had occurred
nearly two months earlier at the time of Von Rundstedt's dismissal and
Hitler's swift appointment of Von Kluge as the old Field Marshal's
successor. On sick leave for months from his command in Russia, Von
Kluge happened to be making a courtesy call on the F@uhrer at the
precise moment when Hitler decided to dismiss Von Rundstedt. With no
preamble, and possibly because Von Kluge happened to be the only senior
officer in sight, Hitler had named the astonished Von Kluge Commander
in Chief, West.

Von Kluge, a veteran front commander, took over on July 4. He was to
last forty-four days. Exactly as predicted by Von Rundstedt, the
Allied breakout occurred. "The whole western front has been ripped
open," Von Kluge informed Hitler. Overwhelmed by the Allied tide
pouring across France, Von Kluge, like Von

Rundstedt before him, found his hands tied by Hitler's insistent "no
withdrawal" orders. The German armies in France were encircled and all
but destroyed. It was during this period that another convulsion
racked the Third Reich--an abortive assassination attempt on Hitler's
life.

During one of the endless conferences at the F@uhrer's headquarters, a
time bomb in a briefcase, placed by Colonel Claus Graf von Stauffenberg
beneath a table close to Hitler, exploded, killing and wounding many in
the room. The F@uhrer escaped with minor injuries. Although only a
small elite group of officers were involved in the plot, Hitler's
revenge was barbaric. Anyone connected with the plotters, or with
their families, was arrested; and many individuals, innocent or not,
were summarily executed. * Some five thousand people lost their lives.
Von Kluge had been indirectly implicated, and Hitler also suspected
him of trying to negotiate a surrender with the enemy. Von Kluge was
replaced by Model and ordered to report immediately to the F@uhrer.
Before leaving his headquarters the despairing Von Kluge wrote a letter
to Hitler. Then, en route to Germany, he took poison. * Hitler took
advantage of his most senior officer, Von Rundstedt, once again by
making him President of the Court of Honor that passed judgment on the
officers suspected. Von Rundstedt quietly acceded to the F@uhrer's
request. "If I had not," he later explained, "I too might have been
considered a traitor." Von Rundstedt's explanation has never satisfied
many of his brother generals, who privately denounced him for bending
to Hitler's request.

When you receive these lines I shall be no more [he wrote to the
F@uhrer]. ... I did everything within my power to be equal to the
situation ... Both Rommel and I, and probably all the other commanders
here in the west with experience of battle against the Anglo-Americans,
with their preponderance of material, foresaw the present developments.
We were not listened to. Our appreciations were not dictated by
pessimism, but from sober knowledge of the facts. I do not know
whether Field Marshal Model, who has been proved in every sphere, will
master the situation. From my heart I hope so. Should it not be so,
however, and your new weapons ... not succeed, then, my F@uhrer, make
up your mind to end the war. It is time to put an end to this
frightfulness. ... I have always admired your greatness ... and

your iron will ... Show yourself now also great enough to put an end to
this hopeless struggle. ...

Hitler had no intention of conceding victory to the Allies, even though
the Third Reich that he had boasted would last a millennium was
undermined and tottering. On every front he was attempting to stave
off defeat. Yet each move the F@uhrer made seemed more desperate than
the last.

Model's appointment as OB West had not helped. Unlike Von Rundstedt
or, briefly, Von Kluge, Model did not have the combat genius of Rommel
as support. After Rommel was badly wounded by a strafing Allied plane
on July 17, no one had been sent to replace him. * Model did not at
first appear to feel the need. Confident that he could right the
situation, he took on Rommel's old command as well, becoming not only
OB West but also Commander of Army Group B. Despite Model's expertise,
the situation was too grave for any one commander. * Rommel, who was
also suspected by Hitler of being involved in the assassination
attempt, died three months later. While convalescing at his home,
Hitler gave him a choice: stand trial for treason or commit suicide.
On october 14, Rommel swallowed cyanide, and Hitler announced that the
Reich's most popular field marshal had "died of wounds sustained on the
battlefield."

At this time Army Group B was battling for survival along a line
roughly between the Belgian coast and the Franco-Luxembourg border.
From there, south to Switzerland, the remainder of Model's
command--Army Group G under General Blaskowitz--had already been
written off. Following the second Allied invasion on August 15, by
French and American forces in the Marseilles area, Blaskowitz' group
had hurriedly departed southern France. Under continuous pressure they
were now falling back in disarray to the German border.

Along Model's disintegrating northern front, where Allied armor had
torn the 75-mile-wide gap in the line, the route from Belgium into
Holland and from there across Germany's vulnerable northwest frontier
lay open and undefended. Allied forces driving into Holland could
outflank the Siegfried Line where the massive belt of fortifications
extending along Germany's frontiers from Switzerland terminated at
Kleve on the Dutch-German

border. By turning this northern tip of Hitler's Westwall and crossing
the Rhine, the Allies could swing into the Ruhr, the industrial heart
of the Reich. That maneuver might well bring about the total collapse
of Germany.

Twice in seventy-two hours Model appealed desperately to Hitler for
reinforcements. The situation of his forces in the undefended gap was
chaotic. Order had to be restored and the breach closed. Model's
latest report, which he had sent to Hitler in the early hours of
September 4, warned that the crisis was approaching and unless he
received a minimum of "twenty-five fresh divisions and an armored
reserve of five or six panzer divisions," the entire front might
collapse, thereby opening the "gateway into northwest Germany."

Model's greatest concern was the British entry into Antwerp. He did
not know whether the huge port, the second-largest in Europe, was
captured intact or destroyed by the German garrison. The city of
Antwerp itself, lying far inland, was not the crux. To use the port,
the Allies needed to control its seaward approach, an inlet 54 miles
long and 3 miles wide at its mouth, running into Holland from the North
Sea past Walcheren Island and looping alongside the South Beveland
peninsula. So long as German guns commanded the Schelde estuary, the
port of Antwerp could be denied the Allies.

Unfortunately for Model, apart from antiaircraft batteries and heavy
coastal guns on Walcheren Island, he had almost no forces along the
northern bank. But on the other side of the Schelde and almost
isolated in the Pas de Calais was General Gustav von Zangen's Fifteenth
Army--a force of more than 80,000 men. Though pocketed--the sea lay
behind them to the north and west, and Canadians and British were
pressing in from the south and east--they nevertheless controlled most
of the southern bank of the estuary.

By now, Model believed, British tanks, exploiting the situation, would
surely be moving along the northern bank and sweeping it clear. Before
long the entire South Beveland peninsula could be

in their hands and sealed off from the Dutch mainland at its narrow
base north of the Belgian border, barely 18 miles from Antwerp. Next,
to open the port, the British would turn on the trapped Fifteenth Army
and clear the southern bank. Von Zangen's forces had to be
extricated.

Late in the afternoon of September 4 at Army Group B's headquarters
southeast of Liege in the village of La Chaude Fontaine, Model issued a
series of orders. By radio he commanded Von Zangen to hold the
southern bank of the Schelde and reinforce the lesser ports of Dunkirk,
Boulogne and Calais, which Hitler had earlier decreed were to be held
with "fanatical determination as fortresses." With the remainder of
his troops the hapless Von Zangen was to attack northeast into the
avalanche of British armor. It was a desperate measure, yet Model saw
no other course. If Von Zangen's attack was successful, it might
isolate the British in Antwerp and cut off Montgomery's armored
spearheads driving north. Even if the attack failed, Von Zangen's
effort might buy time, slowing up the Allied drive long enough for
reserves to arrive and hold a new front along the Albert Canal.

Exactly what reinforcements were on the way, Model did not know. As
darkness fell he finally received Hitler's answer to his pleas for new
divisions to stabilize the front. It was the terse news of his
replacement as Commander in Chief, West, by Field Marshal von
Rundstedt. Von Kluge had lasted forty-four days as OB West, Model
barely eighteen. Normally temperamental and ambitious, Model reacted
calmly on this occasion. He was more aware of his shortcomings as an
administrator than his critics believed. * Now he could concentrate on
the job he knew best: * Twice Model informed Hitler of his inability to
command both OB West and Army Group B. "We rarely saw him," OB West's
Chief of Staff Blumentritt recalled. "Model hated paper work and spent
most of his time in the field." Lieutenant General Bodo Zimmermann, OB
West's operations chief, wrote after the war (Ocmh MS 308, pp.
153-154) that though Model "was a thoroughly capable soldier," he often
"demanded too much and that too quickly," hence "losing sight of what
was practically possible." He had a tendency to "dissipate his
forces," added Zimmermann, and "staff work suffered under his
too-frequent absences and erratic, inconsistent demands."

being a front-line commander, solely in charge of Army Group B. But,
among the flurry of frantic orders Model issued On this last day as OB
West, one would prove momentous. It concerned the relocation of his II
SS Panzer Corps.

The commander of the Corps, fifty-year-old Obergruppenf@uhrer
(lieutenant General) Wilhelm Bittrich, had been out of touch with Model
for more than seventy-two hours. His forces, fighting almost
continuously since Normandy, had been badly mauled. Bittrich's tank
losses were staggering, his men short on ammunition and fuel. In
addition, because of the breakdown of communications, the few orders he
had received by radio were already out of date when Bittrich got them.
Uncertain of the enemy's movements and badly in need of direction,
Bittrich set out on foot to find Model. He finally located the Field
Marshal at Army Group B headquarters near Li@ege. "I had not seen him
since the Russian front in 1941," Bittrich later recalled. "Monocle in
his eye, wearing his usual short leather coat, Model was standing
looking at a map and snapping out commands one after the other. There
was little time for conversation. Pending official orders, which would
follow, I was told to move my Corps headquarters north into Holland."
With all possible speed Bittrich was directed to "supervise the
refitting and rehabilitation of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions."
The battered units, Model told him, were to "slowly disengage from the
battle and immediately head north." * * Understandably perhaps, German
records of this period are vague and often inexplicable. Commands were
issued, never received, re-sent, countermanded or changed.
Considerable confusion exists about Model's order. According to Army
Group B's war diary, movement orders for the 9th and 10th SS Panzer
divisions were sent on the night of September 3. If so, they were never
received. Also, it is recorded that Bittrich received his instructions
forty-eight hours later to supervise the regrouping and rehabilitation
of not only the 9th but the 2nd and 116th Panzer units. Curiously, the
10th is not mentioned. I can find no evidence that either the 2nd or
116th ever reached the Arnhem area. (it appears they continued
fighting at the front.) According to Bittrich's own papers and logs, he
received Model's orders orally on September 4 and duly directed only
the 9th and 10th to proceed north. Both units, according to their
commanders, began slowly withdrawing on September 5-6.

The almost unknown Bittrich could hardly foresee the critical role his
9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions would play within the next two weeks.
The site Model chose for Bittrich was in a quiet zone, at this point
some seventy-five miles behind the front. By a historic fluke, the
area included the city of Arnhem.

The headlong retreat of the Germans out of Holland was slowing,
although few of the jubilant Dutch realized it as yet. From the
Belgian border north to Arnhem, roads were still choked, but there was
a difference in the movement. From his post in the Provincial Building
above the Arnhem bridge, Charles Labouch@ere saw no letup in the flood
of vehicles, troops and Nazi sympathizers streaming across the bridge.
But a few blocks north of Labouch@ere's location, Gerhardus Gysbers, a
seller of antique books, saw a change take place. German troops
entering Arnhem from the west were not moving on. The compound of the
Willems Barracks next to Gysbers' home and the streets in the immediate
vicinity were filling with horse-drawn vehicles and disheveled
soldiers. Gysbers noted Luftwaffe battalions, antiaircraft personnel,
Dutch SS and elderly men of the 719th Coastal Division. It was clear
to Arnhem's resistance chief, Pieter Kruyff, that this was no temporary
halt. These troops were not heading back into Germany. They were
slowly regrouping; some horse-drawn units of the 719th were starting to
move south. Kruyff's chief of intelligence for the Arnhem region,
thirty-three-year-old Henri Knap, unobtrusively cycling through the
area, spotted the subtle change, too. He was puzzled. He wondered if
the optimistic broadcasts

from London were false. If so, they were cruel deceptions. Everywhere
he saw the Dutch rejoicing. Everyone knew that Montgomery's troops had
taken Antwerp. Surely Holland would be liberated within hours. Knap
could see the Germans were reorganizing. While they still had little
strength, he knew that if the British did not come soon that strength
would grow.

In Nijmegen, eleven miles to the south, German military police were
closing off roads leading to the German frontier. Elias Broekkamp, a
wine importer, saw some troops moving north toward Arnhem, but the
majority were being funneled back and traffic was being broken up,
processed and fanned out. As in Arnhem, the casual spectator seemed
unaware of the difference. Broekkamp observed Dutch civilians laughing
and jeering at what they believed to be the Germans' bewildering
predicament.

In fact the predicament was growing much less. Nijmegen was turning
into a troop staging area, once more in the firm control of German
military.

Farther south, in Eindhoven, barely ten miles from the Belgian border,
the retreat had all but stopped. In the straggling convoys moving
north there were now more Nazi civilians than troops. Frans Kortie,
who had seen the Germans dismantling antiaircraft guns on the roofs of
the Philips factories, noted a new development. In a railway siding
near the station he watched a train pulling flatcars into position. On
the cars were heavy antiaircraft guns. Kortie experienced a feeling of
dread.

Far more disheartening for observant Dutch was the discovery that
reinforcements were coming in from Germany. In Tilburg, Eindhoven,
Helmond and Weert, people saw contingents of fresh troops arrive by
train. Unloaded quickly and formed up, they set out for the
Dutch-Belgian border. They were not regular Wehrmacht soldiers. They
were seasoned, well-equipped and disciplined, and their distinctive
helmets and camouflaged smocks instantly identified them as veteran
German paratroopers.

By late afternoon of September 5 Colonel General Kurt Student's first
paratroop formations were digging in at points along the north side of
Belgium's Albert Canal. Their haste was almost frantic. Student, on
his arrival at noon, had discovered that Model's "new German line" was
strictly the 80-foot-wide water barrier itself. Defense positions had
not been prepared. There were no strong points, trenches or
fortifications. And, to make matters worse for the defenders, Student
noted, "almost everywhere the southern bank dominated the northern
side." Even the bridges over the canal were still standing. Only now
were engineers placing demolition charges. In all the confusion no one
apparently had ordered the crossings destroyed.

Nevertheless, Student's timetable was well planned. The "blitz move"
of his airborne forces was a spectacular success. "Considering that
these paratroopers were rushed in from all over Germany, from G@ustrow
in Mecklenburg to Bitsch in Lothringen," he later recalled, "and arms
and equipment, brought in from still other parts of Germany, were
waiting for them at the railheads, the speed of the move was
remarkable." Student could only admire "the astonishing precision of
the general staff and the entire German organization." Lieutenant
General Karl Sievers' 719th Coastal Division had made good time, too.
Student was heartened to see their columns heading for positions north
of Antwerp "clattering down the roads to the front, their transports
and artillery pulled by heavy draft horses." * Hour by hour, his *
Despite the confusion, horse-lover Student took the time to note in his
diary that "these huge animals were Clydesdale, Percheron, Danish and
Frisian types." Contrary to general belief, Hitler's armies, unlike
the Allies', were never totally motorized. Even at the pinnacle of
German strength more than 50 percent of their transport was
horse-drawn.

hastily formed First Parachute Army was arriving. Also, by
extraordinary good fortune, help had come from a most unexpected
source.

The headlong retreat from Belgium into Holland had been slowed and then
virtually stopped by the doggedness and ingenuity of one man:
Lieutenant General Kurt Chill. Because his 85th Infantry Division was
almost totally destroyed, Chill had been ordered to save whatever
remained and move back into Germany. But the strong-willed general,
watching the near-panic on the roads and prompted by Model's Order of
the Day, decided to disregard orders. Chill concluded that the only
way to avert catastrophe was to organize a line along the Albert Canal.
He welded what remained of his 85th Division with the remnants of two
others and quickly dispersed these men to strategic points on the
northern bank of the canal. Next, he turned his attention to the
bridges and set up "reception centers" at their northern exits. In
twenty-four hours Chill succeeded in netting thousands of servicemen
from nearly every branch of the German armed forces. It was a
"crazy-quilt mob," * including Luftwaffe mechanics, military-government
personnel, naval coastal units and soldiers from a dozen different
divisions, but these stragglers, armed at best with rifles, were
already on the canal when Student arrived. * Charles B. MacDonald, The
Siegfried Line Campaign, p. 124. Published in the official U.s. Army
History series, MacDonald's volume and Martin Blumenson's Breakout and
Pursuit together give the most accurate military picture of the German
debacle in the west and the events that followed. Another valuable
work on the period, more vivid perhaps because it was written shortly
after the war, is Milton Shulman's Defeat in the West.

Student called Chill's virtuoso performance in halting the near-rout
"miraculous." With remarkable speed he had established a defense line
of sorts, helping to buy a little time for all of Student's forces to
arrive. This would still take several days. Even with the boost from
Chill, Student's patchwork First Parachute Army might total at best
18,000-20,000 men, plus some artillery,

antiaircraft guns and twenty-five tanks-- hardly the equivalent of an
American division. And racing toward this scanty force--so thin that
Student could not even man the 75-mile Antwerp-Maastricht gap, let
alone close it--were the awesome armored forces of the British Second
Army and part of the U.s. First Army. Student was outgunned and
outnumbered; about all that stood between him and disaster was the
Albert Canal itself.

At what point along it would the enemy attack? Student's line was
vulnerable everywhere, but some areas were more critical than others.
He was particularly concerned about the sector north of Antwerp, where
the weak 719th Coastal Division was only now taking up position. Was
there still time to take advantage of the 80-foot-wide water barrier
and turn it into a major defense line that would delay the Allies long
enough for additional reinforcements to reach the canal? This was
Student's greatest hope.

He expected to be attacked at any moment, yet there were still no
reports of Allied armor. Student was particularly surprised that there
was almost no enemy contact north of Antwerp. He had by now expected
that British tanks, after capturing the city, would strike north, cut
off the Beveland peninsula, and smash into Holland. It seemed to
Student that the British had slowed down. But why?

Four times in eighteen days the vast complex of the German Supreme
Headquarters in the West had been forced to move. Bombed, shelled,
almost overrun by Allied tanks, OB West had finally come to a halt
behind the borders of the Reich. And shortly after 2 P.m. on September
5 the new commander in chief found his headquarters in the little town
of Aremberg near Koblenz.

Tired and irritable after his long journey, Field Marshal Gerd von
Rundstedt dispensed with the usual military courtesies and fanfare that
often accompanied a German change of command. Immediately he plunged
into a series of staff conferences that

were to last long into the evening. Officers not personally acquainted
with the field marshal were startled by the speed of his takeover. To
older hands, it was as though he had never been away. For everyone,
the very presence of Von Rundstedt brought feelings of relief and
renewed confidence.

Von Rundstedt's task was formidable, his problems were massive. He
must produce, as quickly as possible, a strategic blueprint for the
400-mile western front running from the North Sea all the way to the
Swiss border--a plan which Field Marshal Model had candidly found
beyond his capability. With the battered forces at Von Rundstedt's
disposal--Army Group B in the north and G in the south--he was expected
to hold everywhere and even to counterattack, as Hitler had directed.
Simultaneously, to stave off invasion of the Reich, he was to make a
reality of Hitler's "impregnable" Siegfried Line--the long-obsolete,
unfinished concrete fortifications which had lain neglected, unmanned,
and stripped of guns since 1940. There was more, but on this afternoon
Von Rundstedt gave first priority to the immediate problems. They were
far worse than even he had anticipated.

The picture was bleak. Before his dismissal by Hitler in July, Von
Rundstedt had command of sixty-two divisions. Now his operations
chief, Lieutenant General Bodo Zimmermann, produced an ominous balance
sheet. In the two army groups, he told the Field Marshal, there were
"forty-eight "paper" divisions, fifteen panzer divisions and four
brigades with almost no tanks." So weak in men, equipment and
artillery were these forty-eight divisions, Zimmermann said, that in
his view they constituted "a combat power equivalent to only
twenty-seven divisions." This force was less than "half the strength
of the Allies." Von Rundstedt learned that his staff believed
Eisenhower had at least sixty divisions, completely motorized and at
full strength. (this estimate was wrong. Eisenhower had, at this
moment, forty-nine divisions on the Continent.)

As for German panzer forces, they were virtually nonexistent. Along
the entire front, against the Allies' estimated strength of more than
two thousand tanks, there were only one hundred

panzers left. The Luftwaffe had been virtually destroyed; above the
battlefield, the Allies had complete aerial supremacy. Von Rundstedt's
own grim summation was that in troops, most of whom were exhausted and
demoralized, he was outnumbered more than 2 to 1; in artillery by 2-1/2
guns to 1; in tanks, 20 to 1; and in planes, 25 to 1. * Besides there
were grave shortages in gasoline, transportation and ammunition. Von
Rundstedt's new chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, was later
to recall, "The situation was desperate. A major defeat anywhere along
the front--which was so full of gaps that it did not deserve the
name--would lead to catastrophe if the enemy were to fully exploit the
opportunities." * German losses in men and mat@eriel had been
staggering. In the ninety-two days since the invasion of Normandy,
300,000 German troops had been killed or wounded or were missing;
another 200,000 were surrounded, holding "last-ditch fortresses" such
as ports or in the Channel Islands. Some 53 German divisions had been
destroyed, and strewn across France and Belgium were vast quantities of
mat@eriel including at least 1,700 tanks, 3,500 guns, thousand's of
armored vehicles and horse-drawn or motorized transports and mountains
of equipment and supplies ranging from small arms to vast ammunition
dumps. The casualties included two field marshals and more than twenty
generals.

Lieutenant General Blumentritt, fully agreeing with Westphal's view,
was even more specific. * In his opinion, if the Allies mounted "a
major thrust resulting in a breakthrough anywhere," collapse would
follow. The only capable troops Von Rundstedt had were those facing
General George S. Patton's U.s. Third Army driving toward Metz and
heading for the industrial region of the Saar. These forces might
delay Patton, but they were not strong enough to stop him. Rather than
waste precious time, it seemed to Blumentritt that the Allies would
strike where the Germans were weakest--by attempting a powerful thrust
in the north to cross the Rhine and move into the Ruhr. That drive, he
believed, might be given priority by the Americans and the British,
because, as he later put it, "He who holds northern Germany, holds
Germany." * To Von Rundstedt's annoyance, General Blumentritt, who had
long been his chief of staff and most trusted confidant, was replaced
by General Westphal on September 5 and ordered back to Germany. Von
Rundstedt protested the change, to no avail. Blumentritt did, however,
attend the early conferences in Aremberg and did not leave the
headquarters until September 8.

Von Rundstedt had already reached the same conclusion. Seizing the
Ruhr was undoubtedly the major Allied objective. The British and
Americans in the north were driving in that direction, toward the
frontier at Aachen. There was little to stop them from penetrating the
unmanned, outdated Siegfried Line, crossing Germany's last natural
barrier, the vital Rhine, and striking into the Reich's industrial
heart.

Von Rundstedt's analytical mind had seized on one more fact.
Eisenhower's skilled and highly trained airborne forces, used so
successfully in the Normandy invasion, had disappeared off German
situation maps. They were not being used as infantry. Obviously these
forces had been withdrawn, preparatory to another airborne operation.
But where and when? It was logical that an airborne drop would
coincide with a drive on the Ruhr. In Von Rundstedt's view such an
attack might come at either of two key areas: behind the Westwall
fortifications, or east of the Rhine to seize bridgeheads. In fact,
Field Marshal Model, several days earlier, had expressed the same fear
in a message to Hitler, stressing the possibility as an "acute threat."
Equally, Von Rundstedt could not discount the possibility of the
entire Allied front moving forward simultaneously toward the Ruhr and
the Saar with airborne troops committed at the same time. The Field
Marshal could see no solution to any of these impending threats.
Allied opportunities were too many and too varied. His only option was
to try to bring order out of chaos and to buy time by outguessing
Allied intentions, if he could.

Von Rundstedt did not underestimate Eisenhower's intelligence of the
German predicament. But, he pondered, was the Allied command really
aware how desperate the situation was? The truth was that he was
fighting, as he put it to Blumentritt, with "rundown old men" and the
pillboxes of the Westwall would be "absolutely useless against an
Allied onslaught." It was "madness," he said, "to defend these mouse
holes for reasons of prestige." Nevertheless, the ghostly Siegfried
Line must be given substance, its fortifications readied and manned.
Tersely, Von

Rundstedt told his staff: "We must somehow hold for at least six
weeks."

Studying each aspect of the situation confronting him, diagraming
possible Allied moves and weighing each alternative, he noted that the
most vigorous attacks were still being made by Patton, heading for the
Saar. In the north British and American pressure was noticeably less.
Von Rundstedt thought he detected an absence of movement, almost a
pause, in that area. Turning his attention to Montgomery's front, as
Blumentritt was later to remember, Von Rundstedt concentrated on the
situation at Antwerp. He was intrigued by reports that, for more than
thirty-six hours now, the British had mounted no drive north from the
city, nor had they cut the South Beveland peninsula. Obviously,
Antwerp's great harbor facilities would solve Allied supply problems.
But they could not use the port if both sides of the 54-mile-long
estuary leading to it remained in German hands. To the Field Marshal,
it seemed clear that the letup he had noted was real; a definite Allied
slowdown had occurred, particularly in Montgomery's area.

Throughout his career, Von Rundstedt had closely studied British
military tactics; he had also, to his own misfortune, been able to
observe American warfare at first hand. He had found the Americans
more imaginative and daring in the use of armor, the British superb
with infantry. In each case, however, commanders made the difference.
Thus, Von Rundstedt considered Patton a far more dangerous opponent
than Montgomery. According to Blumentritt, Von Rundstedt viewed Field
Marshal Montgomery as "overly cautious, habit-ridden and systematic."
Now the Field Marshal weighed the significance of Montgomery's
tardiness. With the other Channel ports still in German hands, Von
Rundstedt saw Antwerp as essential to Eisenhower's advance--so why had
Montgomery not moved for thirty-six hours and apparently failed to
secure the second-largest port in Europe? There could be only one
reason: Montgomery was not ready to continue the attack. Von Rundstedt
was certain that he would not depart from

habit. The British would never attack until the meticulous,
detail-minded Montgomery was fully prepared and supplied. The answer
therefore, Von Rundstedt reasoned, was that the British had
overextended themselves. This was not a pause, Von Rundstedt told his
staff. Montgomery's pursuit, he was convinced, had ground to a halt.

Quickly, Von Rundstedt turned his attention to Model's orders of the
previous twenty-four hours. Because now, if his theory was right, Von
Rundstedt saw a chance not only to deny the port of Antwerp to the
Allies but, equally important, to save General Von Zangen's trapped
Fifteenth Army, a force of more than 80,000 men--men that Von Rundstedt
desperately needed.

From Model's orders he saw that, while Von Zangen had been told to hold
the southern bank of the Schelde and reinforce the Channel ports, he
had also been ordered to attack with the remainder of his troops
northeast into the flank of the British drive--an attack scheduled to
take place on the morning of the sixth. Without hesitation, Von
Rundstedt canceled that attack. Under the circumstances, he saw no
merit to it. Besides, he had a bolder, more imaginative plan. The
first part of Model's orders could stand, because now holding the
Channel ports was more important than ever. But instead of attacking
northeast, Von Zangen was ordered to evacuate his remaining troops by
sea, across the waters of the Schelde to the island of Walcheren. Once
on the northern bank of the estuary, Von Zangen's troops could march
eastward along the one road running from Walcheren Island, across the
South Beveland peninsula until they reached the Dutch mainland north of
Antwerp. Because of Allied air power, ferrying operations across the
3-mile mouth of the Schelde, between the ports of Breskens and
Flushing, would have to take place at night. Nevertheless, with luck,
a good portion of the Fifteenth Army might be safely withdrawn within
two weeks. Von Rundstedt knew that the plan was hazardous, but he saw
no other course, for, if successful, he would have almost an entire
German army, battered though it might be, at his disposal. More than
that he would still--unbelievably --control the vital port of

Antwerp. But the success of the operation would depend entirely on Von
Rundstedt's hunch that Montgomery's drive had indeed come to a halt.

Von Rundstedt was sure of it. Further, he was banking on it that
Montgomery's slowdown held a far deeper significance. Because of
overextended communications and supply lines, he was convinced, the
Allied breakneck pursuit had reached its limit. At the close of the
conference, as Blumentritt was later to recall, "Von Rundstedt looked
at us and suggested the incredible possibility that, for once, Hitler
might be right."

Hitler's and Von Rundstedt's estimates of the situation, although only
partly correct, were far more accurate than either realized. The
precious time Von Rundstedt needed to stabilize his front was being
provided by the Allies themselves. The truth was that the Germans were
losing faster than the Allies could win.

Even as Von Rundstedt gambled desperately to save the trapped Fifteenth
Army, Major General George Philip Roberts, commander of the British
11th Armored Division, 150 miles away in Antwerp, was jubilantly
informing his superiors of a startling development. His men had
captured not only the city but the huge port as well.

Together with the Guards Armored Division, Roberts' tanks had made an
extraordinary dash of more than 250 miles in just five days. The
spearhead of Lieutenant General Miles C. Dempsey's great British Second
Army had been ordered by Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, XXX Corps
commander, to "keep going like mad." Leaving the Guards to capture
Brussels, Roberts'

division bypassed the city and in the early hours of September 4, with
the courageous help of the Belgian underground, entered Antwerp. Now,
some thirty-six hours later, after clearing the deep-sea complex of a
stunned and panic-stricken enemy, Roberts reported that his men had
captured Antwerp's huge 1,000-acre harbor area intact. Warehouses,
cranes, bridges, 3-1/2 miles of wharves, quays, locks, drydocks,
rolling stock--and, unbelievably, even the all-important electrically
controlled sluice gates, in full working order--had been seized.

German plans to demolish the port had failed. Explosives had been
placed on major bridges and other key installations, but, overwhelmed
by the spectacular speed of the British and resistance groups (among
them Belgian engineers who knew exactly where the demolitions were
planted), the disorganized German garrison never had a chance to
destroy the vast harbor facilities.

The thirty-seven-year-old Roberts had brilliantly executed his orders.
Unfortunately, in one of the greatest miscalculations of the European
war, no one had directed him to take advantage of the situation-- that
is, strike north, grab bridgeheads over the Albert Canal in the
northern suburbs, and then make a dash for the base of the South
Beveland peninsula only eighteen miles away. By holding its
2-mile-wide neck, Roberts could have bottled up German forces on the
isthmus, preparatory to clearing the vital northern bank. It was a
momentous oversight. * The port of Antwerp, one of the war's major
prizes, was secured; but its approaches, still held by the Germans,
were not. This great facility, which could have shortened and fed
Allied supply lines all * The late B. H. Liddell Hart, the celebrated
British historian, in his History of the Second World War wrote: "It
was a multiple lapse-- by four commanders from Montgomery downwards
..." Charles B. MacDonald, the American historian in The Mighty
Endeavor, agrees with Liddell Hart. He called the failure "one of the
greatest tactical mistakes of the war." The best and most detailed
account on the cost of Antwerp is undoubtedly R. W. Thompson, The 85
Days, and I agree with him that one of the main reasons for the missed
opportunity was "weariness." Men of the 11th Armored, he wrote, "slept
where they sat, stood or lay, drained of emotion, and in utter
exhaustion." If we accept his theory it is doubtful that Roberts' 11th
could have continued its drive with the same vigor. Nevertheless,
Antwerp and its vital approaches, argues Thompson, might have been
taken with ease "had there been a commander following the battle, hour
by hour, day by day, and with the flexibility of command to see the
prospect."

along the front, was useless. Yet nobody, in the heady atmosphere of
the moment, saw this oversight as more than a temporary condition.
Indeed, there seemed no need to hurry. With the Germans reeling, the
mop-up could take place at any time. The 11th Armored, its assignment
completed, held its positions awaiting new orders.

The magnificent drive of Dempsey's armored forces in the north,
equaling that of Patton's south of the Ardennes, had run its course,
though at this moment few realized it. Roberts' men were exhausted,
short on gasoline and supplies. The same was true of the remainder of
General Brian Horrocks' XXX Corps. Thus, on this same afternoon, the
relentless pressure that had thrown the Germans back in the north,
shattered and demoralized, suddenly relaxed. The blunder at Antwerp
was compounded as the British came to a halt to "refit, refuel, and
rest."

General Horrocks, the XXX Corps's capable and dynamic commander, was
not even thinking about Antwerp. * Like Field Marshal Montgomery,
commander of the British 21/ Army Group, his attention was focused on
another target: the crossing of the Rhine and a swift end to the war.
Only a few hours earlier, elated at the verve and dash of his armies,
Montgomery had cabled the Supreme Commander, General Dwight D.
Eisenhower: "We have now reached a stage where a really powerful and
full-blooded thrust towards Berlin is likely to get there and thus end
the war." * Horrocks, in his memoirs, gives a very frank explanation.
"My excuse is that my eyes were fixed entirely on the Rhine and
everything else seemed of subsidiary importance. It never entered my
head that the Schelde would be mined and that we would not be able to
use Antwerp until the channel had been swept and the Germans cleared
from the coastlines on either side. ... Napoleon would, no doubt, have
realized these things but Horrocks didn't." He also readily admits
there was little opposition ahead of him and "we still had 100 miles of
petrol per vehicle and one further day's supply within reach." There
would have been "considerable risk" but "I believe that if we had taken
the chance and carried straight on with our advance, instead of halting
in Brussels, the whole course of the war in Europe might have been
changed."

In London, His Royal Highness, the Prince of the Netherlands conferred
with Queen Wilhelmina and then telephoned his wife,

the Princess Juliana, in Canada. He urged her to fly immediately to
England, ready to return to the Netherlands the moment the country was
freed. Their long exile was about to end. The liberation, when it
came, would be swift. They must be ready. Yet Bernhard was uneasy.

Over the past seventy-two hours messages reaching him from the
resistance had again and again underscored the German panic in Holland
and repeated the news that the retreat, begun on September 2, was still
in progress. Now, on the fifth, underground leaders reported that
although the Germans were still disorganized, the exodus appeared to be
slowing down. Bernhard had also heard from the Dutch Prime Minister in
exile. Prime Minister Gerbrandy was somewhat embarrassed. Obviously
his September 3 broadcast was premature; Allied troops had most
certainly not crossed the Dutch border as yet. The Prince and the
Prime Minister pondered the reason. Why had the British not moved?
Surely, from the underground messages they received, the situation in
Holland was clear.

Bernhard had little military training and was dependent on his own
advisers, yet he was puzzled. * If the Germans were still disorganized
and, as his resistance leaders believed, a "thrust by a few tanks"
could liberate the country "in a matter of hours"--why, then, didn't
the British proceed? Perhaps Montgomery disbelieved the reports of the
Dutch resistance because he considered them amateurish or unreliable.
Bernhard could find no other explanation. Why else would the British
hesitate, instead of instantly crossing the border? Although he was in
constant touch * The young Prince, although named Commander in Chief of
the Netherlands Forces by the Queen, was quite frank in interviews with
the author regarding his military background. "I had no tactical
experience," he told me, "except for a course at the War College before
the war. I followed this up with courses in England, but most of my
military knowledge was learned in a practical way by reading and by
discussions with my officers. However, I never considered myself
experienced enough to make a tactical decision. I depended on my
staff, who were very well qualified." Nevertheless Bernhard took his
job very seriously. In his meticulously kept personal diary for 1944,
which he kindly placed at my disposal, he recorded in minuscule
handwriting each movement, almost minute by minute, from telephone
calls and military conferences to official functions. During this
period, based on his own notations, I would estimate that his average
working day was about sixteen hours.

with his ministers, the United States ambassador at large, Anthony
Biddle, and Eisenhower's chief of staff, Bedell Smith, and as a result
was well aware that, at this moment, the advance was so fluid that the
situation was changing almost hour by hour, nevertheless Bernhard
thought he would like firsthand information. He made a decision: he
would request permission of SHAEF to fly to Belgium and see Field
Marshal Montgomery himself as soon as possible. He had every faith in
the Allied high command and, in particular, Montgomery. Still, if
something was wrong, Bernhard had to know.

At his spartan, tented headquarters in the Royal Palace Gardens at
Laeken, a few miles from the center of Brussels, Field Marshal Bernard
Law Montgomery impatiently waited for an answer to his coded "Personal
for Eisenhower Eyes Only" message. Its urgent demand for a powerful
and full-blooded thrust to Berlin was sent in the late hours of
September 4. Now, by midday on September 5, the brusque, wiry
fifty-eight-year-old hero of El Alamein waited for a reply and
impatiently fretted about the future course of the war. Two months
before the invasion of Normandy he had said, "If we do our stuff
properly and no mistakes are made, then I believe that Germany will be
out of the war this year." In Montgomery's unalterable opinion, a
momentous strategic mistake had been made just before the Allies
captured Paris and crossed the Seine. Eisenhower's "broad-front
policy"--moving his armies steadily forward to the borders of the
Reich, then up to the Rhine--may have been valid when planned before
the invasion, but with the sudden disorderly collapse of the Germans,
the Britisher believed, it was now obsolete. As Montgomery put it,
that strategy had become "unstitched." And all his military training
told him "we could not get away with it and ... would be faced with a
long winter campaign with all that that entailed for the British
people."

On August 17 he had proposed to General Omar N. Bradley,

the U.s. 12th Army Group commander, a single-thrust plan. Both his own
and Bradley's army group should stay "together as a solid mass of forty
divisions, which would be so strong that it need fear nothing. This
force should advance northeastward." Montgomery's 21/ Army Group would
clear the Channel coast, and secure Antwerp and southern Holland.
Bradley's U.s. 12th Army Group, its right flank on the Ardennes, would
head for Aachen and Cologne. The basic objective of Montgomery's
proposed drive was to "secure bridgeheads over the Rhine before the
winter began and to seize the Ruhr quickly." In all probability, he
theorized, it would also end the war. Montgomery's plan called for
three of Eisenhower's four armies--the British Second, the U.s. First
and the Canadian First. The fourth, Patton's U.s. Third Army, at this
moment making headlines around the world for its spectacular advances,
Montgomery dismissed. He calmly suggested it should be brought to a
halt.

Some forty-eight hours later Montgomery learned that Bradley, who he
had believed was responsive to his own idea, actually favored an
American thrust, a Patton drive toward the Rhine and Frankfurt.
Eisenhower rejected both plans; he was not prepared to change his
strategic concept. The Supreme Commander wanted to remain flexible
enough to thrust both to the Ruhr and the Saar as the occasion
permitted. To Montgomery, this was no longer the "broad-front policy"
but a double-thrust plan. Everybody now, he felt, was "going his own
way"--especially Patton, who seemed to be allowed enormous latitude.
Eisenhower's determination to persist in his original concept revealed
quite clearly, in Montgomery's opinion, that the Supreme Commander was
"in fact, completely out of touch with the land battle."

Montgomery's view was based on a recent development which angered him
and, he felt, demeaned his own role. He was no longer the over-all
coordinator of the land battle. On September 1 Eisenhower had
personally taken over command. Because the Supreme Commander believed
Montgomery "a master of the set battle piece," he had given the British
general operational control of the D-Day assault and the initial period
of fighting thereafter.

Thus, General Omar N. Bradley's 12th Army Group was under Montgomery.
Press stories appearing in the United States at the end of August
revealing that Bradley's army group still operated under Montgomery
created such a public furor that Eisenhower was promptly ordered by
General George C. Marshall, U.s. Chief of Staff, to "immediately assume
direct command" of all ground forces. American armies reverted back to
their own command. The move caught Montgomery off base. As his chief
of staff, General Francis de Guingand, later put it: "Montgomery never,
I believe, thought that the day would come so soon. Possibly he hoped
that the initial command set up was there to stay for a long time. He
was, I think, apt to give insufficient weight to the dictates of
prestige and national feelings, or to the increasing contribution of
America, in both men and arms ... it was obvious, however, to most of
us that it would have been an impossible situation for a British
general and a British headquarters to retain command of these more
numerous American formations indefinitely." *1 It may have been
obvious to his staff but not to Montgomery. He felt publicly
humiliated. *2 *1 Major General Francis de Guingand, Generals at War,
pp. 100-101. *2 Montgomery and the British public, as outraged as he,
were somewhat mollified when George VI, at Churchill's strong urging,
made Montgomery a field marshal on September 1.

It was hardly a secret that Monty and his superior, Sir Alan Brooke,
Chief of the Imperial General Staff, were highly critical of
Eisenhower. Both men considered him ambivalent and indecisive. In a
letter to Montgomery on July 28, Brooke commented that Eisenhower had
only "the very vaguest conception of war!" On another occasion he
summarized the Supreme Commander as "a most attractive personality,"
but with "a very, very limited brain from a strategic point of view."
Montgomery, never a man to mince words, saw "right from the beginning
that Ike had simply no experience for the job," and while history, he
felt, would record Eisenhower "as a very good Supreme Commander, as a
field commander he was very bad, very bad." [Author's interview with
Field Marshal Montgomery.] Angrily, Montgomery began promoting the idea
of an over-all "Land

Forces Commander," a post sandwiched between the army groups and
Eisenhower. He knew just the man for the job--himself. Eisenhower was
well aware of the underground campaign. He remained calm. The Supreme
Commander was, in his way, as obstinate as Montgomery. His orders from
General Marshall were clear and he had no intention of entertaining the
idea of any over-all ground commander other than himself.

Montgomery had no opportunity to discuss his single-thrust plan or his
thoughts about a land-forces commander directly with Eisenhower until
August 23, when the Supreme Commander came to lunch at 21/ Army Group
headquarters. Then the fractious Montgomery, with extraordinary
tactlessness, insisted on a private conversation with the Supreme
Commander. He demanded that Eisenhower's chief of staff, General
Bedell Smith, be excluded from the conference. Smith left the tent,
and for an hour Eisenhower, grimly keeping his temper, was lectured by
his subordinate on the need for "a firm and sound plan." Montgomery
demanded that Eisenhower "decide where the main effort would be" so
that "we could be certain of decisive results quickly." Again and
again he pressed for the "single thrust," warning that if the Supreme
Commander continued the "broad-front strategy with the whole line
advancing and everyone fighting all the time, the advance would
inevitably peter out." If that happened, Montgomery warned, "the
Germans would gain time to recover, and the war would go on all through
the winter and well into 1945. If we split the maintenance,"
Montgomery said, "and advance on a broad front we shall be so weak
everywhere we'll have no chance of success." To his mind there was
only one policy: "to halt the right and strike with the left, or halt
the left and strike with the right." There could only be one thrust
and everything should support it.

Eisenhower saw Montgomery's proposal as a gigantic gamble. It might
produce speedy and decisive victory. It might instead result in
disaster. He was not prepared to accept the risks involved.
Nevertheless he found himself caught between Montgomery on one side and
Bradley and Patton on the other-- each ad-

vocating "the main thrust," each wanting to be entrusted with it.

Up to this point, Montgomery, notorious for his slow-moving, if
successful, tactics, had yet to prove that he could exploit a situation
with the speed of Patton; and at this moment Patton's army, far ahead
of everyone else, had crossed the Seine and was racing toward Germany.
Diplomatically, Eisenhower explained to Montgomery that, whatever the
merits of a single thrust, he could hardly hold back Patton and stop
the U.s. Third Army in its tracks. "The American people," said the
Supreme Commander, "would never stand for it, and public opinion wins
wars." Montgomery heatedly disagreed. "Victories win wars," he
announced. "Give people victory and they won't care who won it."

Eisenhower was not impressed. Although he did not say so at the time,
he thought Montgomery's view was "much too narrow," and that the Field
Marshal did not "understand the over-all situation." Eisenhower
explained to Montgomery that he wanted Patton to continue eastward so
that a link-up might be effected with the American and French forces
advancing from the south. In short, he made it quite clear that his
"broad-front policy" would continue.

Montgomery turned for the moment to the subject of a land commander.
"Someone must run the land battle for you." Eisenhower, Montgomery
declared, should "sit on a very lofty perch in order to be able to take
a detached view of the whole intricate problem, which involves land,
sea, air, et cetera." He retreated from arrogance to humility. If the
matter of "public opinion in America was involved," Montgomery
declared, he would gladly "let Bradley control the battle and serve
under him."

Eisenhower quickly dismissed the suggestion. Placing Bradley over
Montgomery would be as unacceptable to the British people as the
reverse would be to the Americans. As for his own role he could not,
he explained, deviate from the plan to take personal control of the
battle. But, in seeking a solution to some of the immediate problems,
he was ready to make some concessions to Montgomery. He needed the
Channel ports and Antwerp. They were vital to the entire Allied supply
problem. Thus, for the

moment, Eisenhower said, priority would be given to the 21/ Army
Group's northern thrust. Montgomery could use the Allied First
Airborne Army in England--at the time SHAEF'S only reserve.
Additionally, he could have the support of the U.s. First Army moving
on his right.

Montgomery had, in the words of General Bradley, "won the initial
skirmish," but the Britisher was far from satisfied. It was his firm
conviction that Eisenhower had missed the "great opportunity." Patton
shared that view--for different reasons--when the news reached him.
Not only had Eisenhower given supply priority to Montgomery at the
expense of the U.s. Third Army, but he had also rejected Patton's
proposed drive to the Saar. To Patton, it was "the most momentous
error of the war."

In the two weeks since this clash of personalities and conflicting
military philosophies had taken place, much had happened. Montgomery's
21/ Army Group now rivaled Patton's in speed. By September 5, with his
advance units already in Antwerp, Montgomery was more convinced than
ever that his single-thrust concept was right. He was determined to
reverse the Supreme Commander's decision. A crucial turning point in
the conflict had been reached. The Germans, Montgomery was convinced,
were teetering on the verge of collapse.

He was not alone in this view. On nearly every level of command,
intelligence officers were forecasting the imminent end of the war.
The most optimistic estimate came from the Combined Allied Intelligence
Committee in London. The German situation had deteriorated to such an
extent that the group believed the enemy incapable of recovery. There
was every indication, their estimate said, that "organized resistance
under the control of the German high command is unlikely to continue
beyond December 1, 1944, and ... may end even sooner." Supreme
Headquarters shared this optimism. At the end of August, SHAEF'S
intelligence summary declared that "the August battles have done it and
the enemy in the west has had it. Two and one half months of bitter
fighting have brought the end of the war in Europe in sight, almost
within reach." Now, one week later, they considered the

German army "no longer a cohesive force but a number of fugitive battle
groups, disorganized and even demoralized, short of equipment and
arms." Even the conservative director of military operations at the
British War Office, Major General John Kennedy, noted on September 6
that "If we go at the same pace as of late, we should be in Berlin by
the 28th. ..."

In this chorus of optimistic predictions there seemed only one
dissenting voice. The U.s. Third Army's intelligence chief, Colonel
Oscar W. Koch, believed the enemy still capable of waging a last-ditch
struggle and warned that "barring internal upheaval in the homeland and
the remote possibility of insurrection within the Wehrmacht ... the
German armies will continue to fight until destroyed or captured." *
But his own intelligence officer's cautious appraisal meant little to
the Third Army's ebullient commander, Lieutenant General George S.
Patton. Like Montgomery in the north, Patton in the south was now only
one hundred miles from the Rhine. He too believed the time had come,
as Montgomery had put it, "to stick our neck out in a single deep
thrust into enemy territory," and finish off the war. The only
difference lay in their views of who was to stick out his neck. Both
commanders, flushed with victory and bidding for glory, now vied for
that opportunity. In his zeal, Montgomery had narrowed his rivalry
down to Patton alone: a British field marshal in charge of an entire
army group was trying to outrace an American lieutenant general in
charge of a single army. * For a more detailed version of Allied
intelligence estimates see Dr. Forrest C. Pogue, The Supreme Command,
pp. 244-45.

But all along the front the fever of success gripped battle commanders.
After the spectacular sweep across France and Belgium and with
evidence of German defeat all around, men now confidently believed that
nothing could stop the victorious surge from continuing through the
Siegfried Line and beyond, into the heart of Germany. Yet, keeping the
enemy off balance and disorganized demanded constant, unremitting
Allied pressure. Supporting that pressure had now produced a crisis
that few seemed aware of. The heady optimism bordered on
self-deception

for, at this moment, Eisenhower's great armies, after a hectic dash of
more than two hundred miles from the Seine, were caught up in a
gigantic maintenance and supply problem. After six weeks of almost
nonstop advance against little opposition, few noted the sudden loss of
momentum. But as the first tanks approached Germany's threshold and at
places began probing the Westwall itself, the advance began to slow.
The Allied pursuit was over, strangled by its own success.

The chief problem crippling the advance was the lack of ports. There
was no shortage of supplies, but these were stockpiled in Normandy,
still being brought in across the beaches or through the only workable
port, Cherbourg--some 450 miles behind the forward elements. Supplying
four great armies in full pursuit from that far back was a nightmarish
task. A lack of transportation added to the creeping paralysis. Rail
networks, bombed in preinvasion days or destroyed by the French
underground, could not be repaired fast enough. Gasoline pipelines
were only now being laid and extended. As a result, everything from
rations to gasoline was being hauled by road, and there was a
frustrating shortage of trucks.

To keep abreast of the pursuit which, day by day, pushed farther east,
every kind of vehicle was being pressed into service. Artillery,
antiaircraft guns and spare tanks had been unloaded from their
conveyors and left behind so that the conveyors could be used to carry
supplies. Divisions had been stripped of their transport companies.
The British had left one entire corps west of the Seine so that its
transport could service the rest of the speeding army. Montgomery's
difficulties mounted with the discovery that 1,400 British three-ton
trucks were useless because of faulty pistons.

Now, in herculean efforts to keep the pursuit going without pause, a
ceaseless belt of trucks--the "Red Ball Express" --hammered east,
delivered their supplies and then swung back to the west for more, some
convoys often making a grueling round trip of between six and eight
hundred miles. Even with all available transport moving around the
clock and with commanders in the

field applying the most stringent economies, the supply demands of the
armies could not be met. Taxed beyond its capabilities, the makeshift
supply structure had almost reached the breaking point.

Besides the acute transportation problem, men were tired, equipment
worn out after the catapultlike advance from Normandy. Tanks,
half-tracks and vehicles of every description had been driven so long
without proper maintenance that they were breaking down. Overshadowing
everything was a critical shortage of gasoline. Eisenhower's armies,
needing one million gallons per day, were receiving only a fraction of
that amount.

The effect was critical. In Belgium, as the enemy fled before it, an
entire corps of the U.s. First Army was halted for four days, its tanks
dry. Patton's U.s. Third Army, more than a hundred miles ahead of
everyone else, and meeting little opposition, was forced to halt for
five days on the Meuse, because armored columns were out of gas.
Patton was furious when he discovered that of the 400,000 gallons of
gasoline ordered, he had received only 32,000 due to priority cutbacks.
He promptly ordered his leading corps commander: "Get off your fanny
as fast as you can and move on until your engines run dry, then get out
and walk, goddammit!" To his headquarters staff, Patton raged that he
was "up against two enemies --the Germans and our own high command. I
can take care of the Germans, but I'm not sure I can win against
Montgomery and Eisenhower." He tried. Convinced that he could
bludgeon his way into Germany in a matter of days, Patton furiously
appealed to Bradley and Eisenhower. "My men can eat their belts," he
stormed, "but my tanks have gotta have gas."

The crushing defeat of the Germans in Normandy and the systematic and
speedy annihilation of their forces following the breakout had caused
the logistic crisis. On the assumption that the enemy would hold and
fight on the various historic river lines, invasion planners had
anticipated a more conservative advance. A pause for regrouping and
massing of supplies, it was assumed, would take place after the
Normandy beachhead had been secured and Channel ports captured. The
lodgment area was expected to lie west of the river Seine which,
according to the

projected timetable, would not be reached until September 4 (D plus 90
days). The sudden disintegration of the enemy's forces and their
headlong flight eastward had made the Allied timetable meaningless.
Who could have foreseen that by September 4 Allied tanks would be two
hundred miles east of the Seine and in Antwerp? Eisenhower's staff had
estimated that it would take approximately eleven months to reach the
German frontier at Aachen. Now, as tank columns approached the Reich,
the Allies were almost seven months ahead of their advance schedule.
That the supply and transportation system, designed for a much slower
rate of progress, had stood up to the strain of the hectic pursuit at
all was close to miraculous.

Yet, in spite of the critical logistic situation, no one was ready to
admit that the armies must soon halt or that the pursuit was over.
"Every commander from division upwards," Eisenhower later wrote, was
"obsessed with the idea that with only a few more tons of supply, he
could rush right on and win the war. ... Each commander, therefore,
begged and demanded priority over all others, and it was quite
undeniable that in front of each were opportunities for quick
exploitation that made the demands completely logical." Still, the
optimism had infected even the Supreme Commander. It was obvious that
he believed the impetus of the advance could be maintained long enough
for the Allied armies to overrun the Siegfried Line before the Germans
had a chance to defend it, for he saw Signs of "collapse" on the
"entire front." On September 4 he directed that Bradley's "12th Army
Group will capture the Saar and the Frankfurt area." Montgomery's "21/
Army Group will capture the Ruhr and Antwerp."

Even Patton seemed appeased by the announcement. Now he was sure that,
given adequate supplies, his powerful U.s. Third Army could, by itself,
reach the industrial Saar and then dash on all the way to the Rhine. *
And in the unparalleled atmosphere of * Patton's weekly press
conferences were always newsworthy, but especially memorable for the
General's off-the-record remarks, which, because of his colorful
vocabulary, could never have been printed anyway. That first week of
September, as a war correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, I was
present when, in typical fashion, he expounded on his plans for the
Germans. In his high-pitched voice and pounding the map, Patton
declared that, "Maybe there are five thousand, maybe ten thousand, Nazi
bastards in their concrete foxholes before the Third Army. Now, if Ike
stops holding Monty's hand and, gives me the supplies, I'll go through
the Siegfried Line like shit through a goose."

victory that prevailed, Montgomery, with his coded message of September
4, once again doggedly pressed his case. This time he went far beyond
his proposal of August 17 and his conversation with Eisenhower on
August 23. Convinced that the Germans were broken, the commander of
the British 21/ Army Group believed that he could not only reach the
Ruhr but race all the way to Berlin itself.

In his nine-paragraph message to Eisenhower, Montgomery spelled out
again the reasons that convinced him that the moment had come for a
"really powerful and full-blooded thrust." There were two strategic
opportunities open to the Allies, "one via the Ruhr and the other via
Metz and the Saar." But, he argued, because "we have not enough
resources, two such drives could not be maintained." There was a
chance for only one--his. That thrust, the northern one "via the
Ruhr," was, in Montgomery's opinion, "likely to give the best and
quickest results." To guarantee its success, Monty's single thrust
would need "all the maintenance resources ... without qualification."
He was now clearly impatient of any other considerations. He was going
on record both as to the worth of his own plan and his skill and belief
in himself as the one man to carry it off. Other operations would have
to get along with whatever logistic support remained. There could be
no compromise, he warned the Supreme Commander. He dismissed the
possibility of two drives, because "it would split our maintenance
resources so that neither thrust is full-blooded" and as a result
"prolong the war." As Montgomery saw the problem it was "very simple
and clear-cut." But time was of "such vital importance ... that a
decision is required at once."

Acrid and autocratic, the most popular British commander since
Wellington was obsessed by his own beliefs. Considering the acute
logistic situation, he reasoned that his single-thrust theory was now
more valid than it had been two weeks before. In

his intractable way--and indifferent as to how the tone of his message
might be received--Montgomery was not merely suggesting a course of
action for the Supreme Commander; the Field Marshal was dictating one.
Eisenhower must halt all other armies in their tracks--in particular
Patton's--so that all resources could be put behind his single drive.
And his Signal No. M-160 closed with a typical example of Montgomery's
arrogance. "If you are coming this way perhaps you would look in and
discuss it," he proposed. "If so, delighted to see you lunch tomorrow.
Do not feel I can leave this battle just at present." That his
closing words bordered on the insolent seemed not to occur to
Montgomery in his anxiety that this last chance to finish off the
Germans must not be lost. Limpetlike, he clung to his single-thrust
plan. For now he was sure that even Eisenhower must realize that the
time had come to strike the final blow.

In the bedroom of his villa at Granville on the western side of the
Cherbourg peninsula, the Supreme Commander read Montgomery's Signal No.
M-160 with angry disbelief. The fifty-five-year-old Eisenhower
thought Montgomery's proposal "unrealistic" and "fantastic." Three
times Montgomery had nagged him to exasperation about single-thrust
schemes. Eisenhower thought he had settled the strategy conflict once
and for all on August 23. Yet, now Montgomery was not only advocating
his theory once again but was proposing to rush all the way to Berlin.
Usually calm and congenial, Eisenhower now lost his temper. "There
isn't a single soul who believes this can be done, except Montgomery,"
he exploded to members of his staff. At this moment, to Eisenhower's
mind, the most urgent matter was the opening of the Channel ports,
especially Antwerp. Why could Montgomery not understand that? The
Supreme Commander was only too well aware of the glittering
opportunities that existed. But, as he told the Deputy Supreme
Commander, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Tedder, and
SHAEF'S assistant chief of staff

Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, for Montgomery "to talk of
marching to Berlin with an army which is still drawing the great bulk
of its supplies over the beaches is fantastic."

The Field Marshal's message could hardly have come at a worse time.
The Supreme Commander was propped up in bed, his right knee in a cast,
as a consequence of an injury of which Montgomery, at the moment, was
unaware. Eisenhower had more cause than this, however, to be edgy.
Leaving the main body of SHAEF in London, he had come to the Continent
to take personal control on September 1, four days earlier. His small
advance command headquarters at Jullouville near Granville was totally
inadequate. Because of the phenomenal movement of his armies,
Eisenhower was stranded more than four hundred miles from the
front--and there were, as yet, no telephone or teletype facilities.
Except for radio and a rudimentary courier system, he was unable to
communicate immediately with his commanders in the field. The physical
injury which added to these tactical discomforts had occurred after one
of his routine flying visits to his principal commanders. On September
2, returning from a conference at Chartres with senior American
generals, Eisenhower's plane, because of high winds and bad visibility,
had been unable to land at the headquarters airfield. Instead, it had
put down--safely--on the beach near his villa. But then, trying to
help the pilot pull the plane away from the water's edge, Eisenhower
had badly wrenched his right knee. Thus, at this vital juncture in the
war, as the Supreme Commander tried to take control of the land battle
and with events happening so fast that immediate decisions were
necessary, Eisenhower was physically immobilized.

Although Montgomery--or, for that matter, Bradley and Patton--might
feel that Eisenhower "was out of touch with the land battle," only
distance made that argument valid. His excellent, integrated
Anglo-American staff was much more cognizant of the day-to-day
situation in the field than his generals realized. And while he
expected combat commanders to display initiative and boldness, only the
Supreme Commander and his staff could view the over-all situation and
make decisions accordingly. But it was

true that, in this transitional period, while Eisenhower was assuming
personal control, there appeared to be a lack of clear-cut direction,
due in part to the complexity of the Supreme Commander's role.
Coalition command was far from easy. Yet, Eisenhower, maintaining a
delicate balance, and following to the letter the plans of the Combined
Chiefs of Staff, made the system work. In the interest of Allied
amity, he might modify strategy, but Eisenhower had no intention of
throwing caution to the winds and allowing Montgomery, as the Supreme
Commander later put it, to make a "single, knifelike drive toward
Berlin." * * In all fairness to Montgomery, it must be said that he,
himself, never used this phrase. His idea was to throw forty divisions
together and drive toward Berlin--certainly no knifelike thrust--but he
has been credited with the remark and in my opinion it hurt his cause
at SHAEF during the many strategic meetings that took place.

He had been more than tolerant with Montgomery, granting him concession
after concession, often incurring the anger of his own American
generals. Yet, it seemed that Monty "always wanted everything and he
never did anything fast in his life." * Eisenhower said he understood
Montgomery's peculiarities better than the Britisher realized. "Look,
people have told me about his boyhood," Eisenhower recalled, "and when
you have a contest between Eton and Harrow on one side and some of the
lesser schools on the other, some of these juniors coming into the army
* To the author. In a taped interview, President Eisenhower almost
relived for me his emotions at the time of this bitter argument with
Montgomery. When I told him I had interviewed the Field Marshal,
Eisenhower cut me short and said, "You don't have to tell me what he
told you--he said I knew nothing about war--right? Look, I'm
interested only in getting this thing down truthfully and logically,
because any historian has to make deductions. ... Personally, I don't
believe I would put too much weight on what generals remember,
including me. Because memory is a fallible thing ... Goddammit, I
don't know what you heard in Britain, but the British have never
understood the American system of command. ... When the whole damned
thing [WW II] was done ... I never heard from the British any goldarn
paeans of praise. And you're not going to hear it now, particularly
from people like Montgomery. ... His associates--they've said things
about him that I would never dream of repeating. ... I don't care if
he goes down as the greatest soldier in the world. He isn't, but if he
goes down that way it's all right with me. ... He got so damn personal
to make sure that the Americans and me, in particular, had no credit,
had nothing to do with the war, that I eventually just stopped
communicating with him ... I was just not interested in keeping up
communications with a man that just can't tell the truth." The reader
is urged to remember that never, during the war, did the Supreme
Commander publicly discuss the Field Marshal, and his views expressed
here are revealed for the first time.

felt sort of inferior. The man, all his life, has been trying to prove
that he was somebody." Clearly, however, the Field Marshal's views
reflected his British superiors' beliefs on how the Allies should
proceed.

Understandable as this might be, Montgomery's arrogance in presenting
such views invariably set American commanders' teeth on edge. As
Supreme Commander, armed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff with sweeping
powers, Eisenhower had one prime concern: to hold the Allies together
and win the war swiftly. Although some of SHAEF'S staff, including
many Britishers, considered Montgomery insufferable and said so,
Eisenhower never commented on him except in private to his chief of
staff, Bedell Smith. But, in fact, the Supreme Commander's
exasperation with Montgomery went far deeper than anyone knew.
Eisenhower felt that the Field Marshal was "a psychopath ... such an
egocentric" that everything he had ever done "was perfect ... he never
made a mistake in his life." Eisenhower was not going to let him make
one now. "Robbing the American Peter who is fed from Cherbourg," he
told Tedder, "will certainly not get the British Paul to Berlin."

Nevertheless, Eisenhower was deeply disturbed at the widening rift
between him and Britain's favorite general. Within the next few days,
the Supreme Commander decided, he would meet with Montgomery in an
effort to clarify what he considered to be a misunderstanding. Once
more he would attempt to spell out his strategy and hope for agreement,
however grudgingly it might come. In the interim before the meeting,
he made one thing clear. He firmly rejected Montgomery's single-thrust
plan and his bid for Berlin. On the evening of September 5, in a coded
message to the Field Marshal, he said, "While agreeing with your
conception of a powerful and full-blooded thrust toward Berlin, I do
not agree that it should be initiated at this moment to the exclusion
of all other maneuvers." As the Supreme Commander saw it, "the bulk of
the German army in the west has now been destroyed," and that success
should be exploited "by promptly breaching the Siegfried Line, crossing
the Rhine on a wide front and seizing the

Saar and the Ruhr. This I intend to do with all possible speed."
These moves, Eisenhower believed, would place a "strangle hold on
Germany's main industrial areas and largely destroy her capacity to
wage war. ..." Opening the ports of Le Havre and Antwerp was
essential, Eisenhower went on, before any "powerful thrust" into
Germany could be launched. But, at the moment, Eisenhower emphasized,
"no relocation of our present resources would be adequate to sustain a
thrust to Berlin. ..."

Eisenhower's decision took thirty-six hours to reach Montgomery, and
then only the last half of the message arrived. The concluding two
paragraphs were received by Montgomery at 9 A.m. on the morning of
September 7. The opening section did not arrive until September 9,
another forty-eight hours later. As Montgomery saw it, Eisenhower's
communication was one more confirmation that the Supreme Commander was
"too far removed from the battle."

From the first fragment of the message that Montgomery received, it was
abundantly clear that Eisenhower had rejected his plan, for it
contained the sentence, "No relocation of our present resources would
be adequate to sustain a thrust to Berlin." Montgomery immediately
sent off a message disagreeing heatedly.

With the slackening of the pursuit, Montgomery's worst fears were being
realized. German opposition was stiffening. In his message, focusing
in particular on the shortage of supplies, Montgomery claimed that he
was getting only half his requirements, and "I cannot go on for long
like this." He refused to be diverted from his plan to drive to
Berlin. The obvious necessity of immediately opening up the vital port
of Antwerp was not even mentioned in his dispatch, yet he stressed that
"as soon as I have a Pas de Calais port working, I would then require
about 2,500 additional three-ton lorries, plus an assured airlift
averaging about 1,000 tons a day to enable me to get to the Ruhr and
finally Berlin." Because it was all "very difficult to explain," the
Field

Marshal "wondered if it was possible" for Eisenhower to come and see
him. Unshaken in his conviction that the Supreme Commander's decision
was a grave error and confident that his own plan would work,
Montgomery refused to accept Eisenhower's rejection as final. Yet he
had no intention of flying to Jullouville in an attempt to change
Eisenhower's mind. Such diplomacy was not part of his makeup, although
he was fully aware that the only hope of selling his proposal was via a
face-to-face meeting with the Supreme Commander. Outraged and
seething, Montgomery awaited a reply from Eisenhower. The British
Field Marshal was in near-seclusion, impatient and irritable, at the
moment when Prince Bernhard arrived at the headquarters to pay his
respects.

Bernhard had arrived in France on the evening of the sixth. With a
small staff, three jeeps, his Sealyham terrier Martin and a bulging
briefcase containing Dutch underground reports, he and his party flew
to the Continent, guarded by two fighter planes, in three Dakotas with
Bernhard at the controls of one. From the airfield at Amiens they
drove to Douai, fifty miles north, and early on the seventh set out for
Belgium and Brussels. At the Laeken headquarters the Prince was met by
General Horrocks, introduced to Montgomery's staff and ushered into the
presence of the Field Marshal. "He was in a bad humor and obviously
not happy to see me," Bernhard recalled. "He had a lot on his mind,
and the presence of royalty in his area was understandably a
responsibility that he could easily do without."

The Field Marshal's renown as the greatest British soldier of the war
had made him, in Bernhard's words, "the idol of millions of
Britishers." And the thirty-three-year-old Prince was in awe of
Montgomery. Unlike Eisenhower's relaxed, almost casual manner,
Montgomery's demeanor made it difficult for Bernhard to converse easily
with him. Sharp and blunt from the outset, Montgomery made it clear
that Bernhard's presence in his area "worried" him. With justification
untempered by tact or explanation, Montgomery told the Prince that it
would be unwise for Bernhard to visit the headquarters of the Dutch
unit--the Princess Irene Brigade --attached to the British Second Army,
quartered in

the area around Diest, barely ten miles from the front line. Bernhard,
who, as Commander in Chief of the Netherlands Forces, had every
intention of visiting Diest, for the moment did not respond. Instead,
he began to discuss the Dutch resistance reports. Montgomery overrode
him. Returning to the matter, he told the Prince, "You must not live
in Diest. I cannot allow it." Irked, Bernhard felt compelled to point
out that he was "serving directly under Eisenhower and did not come
under the Field Marshal's command." Thus, from the start, as Bernhard
remembers the meeting, "rightly or wrongly, we got off on the wrong
foot." (later, in fact, Eisenhower backed Montgomery regarding Diest,
but he did say that Bernhard could stay in Brussels "close to 21/ Army
Group headquarters, where your presence may be needed.")

Bernhard went on to review the situation in Holland as reflected in the
underground reports. Montgomery was told of the retreat and
disorganization of the Germans, which had been going on since September
2, and of the makeup of the resistance groups. To the best of his
knowledge, Bernhard said, the reports were accurate. Montgomery,
according to the Prince, retorted, "I don't think your resistance
people can be of much use to us. Therefore, I believe all this is
quite unnecessary." Startled by the Field Marshal's bluntness,
Bernhard "began to realize that Montgomery apparently did not believe
any of the messages coming from my agents in Holland. In a way, I
could hardly blame him. I gathered he was a bit fed up with misleading
information that he had received from the French and Belgian resistance
during his advance. But, in this instance, I knew the Dutch groups
involved, the people who were running them and I knew the information
was, indeed, correct." He persisted. Showing the Field Marshal the
message file and quoting from report after report, Bernhard posed a
question: "In view of this, why can't you attack right away?"

"We can't depend on these reports," Montgomery told him. "Just because
the Dutch resistance claim the Germans have been retreating from
September 2 doesn't necessarily mean they are

still retreating." Bernhard had to admit the retreat "was slowing
down," and there were "signs of reorganization." Still, in his
opinion, there was valid reason for an immediate attack.

Montgomery remained adamant. "Anyway," he said, "much as I would like
to attack and liberate Holland, I can't do it because of supplies. We
are short of ammunition. We are short of petrol for the tanks and if
we did attack, in all probability they would become stranded."
Bernhard was astounded. The information he received in England from
both SHAEF and his own advisers had convinced him that the liberation
of Holland would be accomplished in a matter of days. "Naturally I
automatically assumed that Montgomery, commander on the spot, knew the
situation better than anyone else," Bernhard later said. "Yet we had
absolutely every detail on the Germans-- troop strength, the number of
tanks and armored vehicles, the position of antiaircraft guns --and I
knew, apart from immediate front-line opposition, that there was little
strength behind it. I was sick at heart, because I knew that German
strength would grow with each passing day. I was unable to persuade
Montgomery. In fact, nothing I said seemed to matter."

Then Montgomery made an extraordinary disclosure. "I am just as eager
to liberate the Netherlands as you are," he said, "but we intend to do
it in another, even better way." He paused, thought a moment and then,
almost reluctantly, said, "I am planning an airborne operation ahead of
my troops." Bernhard was startled. Instantly a number of questions
came to his mind. In what area were the drops planned? When would the
operation take place? How was it being developed? Yet he refrained
from asking. Montgomery's manner indicated he would say no more. The
operation was obviously still in the planning stage and the Prince's
impression was that only the Field Marshal and a few of his staff
officers knew of the plan. Although he was given no more details,
Bernhard was now hopeful that the liberation of Holland, despite
Montgomery's earlier talk of lack of supplies, was imminent. He must
be patient and wait. The Field Marshal's reputa-

n was awesome. Bernhard believed in it and in the man himself. The
Prince felt a renewal of hope, for "anything Montgomery did, he would
do well."

Eisenhower, acceding to Montgomery's request, set Sunday, September 10,
as the date for a meeting. He was not particularly looking forward to
his meeting with Montgomery and the usual temperamental arguments he
had come to expect from the Field Marshal. He was, however, interested
in learning what progress had been made in one aspect of the Montgomery
operation. Although the Supreme Commander must approve all airborne
plans, he had given Montgomery tactical use of the First Allied
Airborne Army and permission to work out a possible plan involving that
force. He knew that Montgomery, at least since the fourth, had been
quietly exploring the possibility of an airborne operation to seize a
bridgehead across the Rhine.

Ever since the formation of the First Allied Airborne Army under its
American commander, Lieutenant General Lewis Hyde Brereton, six weeks
earlier, Eisenhower had been searching for both a target and a suitable
opportunity to employ the force. To that end he had been pressing
Brereton and the various army commanders to develop bold and
imaginative airborne plans calling for large-scale mass attacks deep
behind the enemy's lines. Various missions had been proposed and
accepted, but all had been canceled. In nearly every case the speeding
land armies had already arrived at the objectives planned for the
paratroops.

Montgomery's original proposal had called for units of Brereton's
airborne force to grab a crossing west of the town of Wesel, just over
the Dutch-German border. However, heavy antiaircraft defenses in that
area had forced the Field Marshal to make a change. The site he then
chose was farther west in Holland: the Lower Rhine bridge at Arnhem
--at this juncture more than seventy-five miles behind the German front
lines.

By September 7, Operation Comet, as the plan was called, was

in readiness; then bad weather, coupled with Montgomery's concern about
the ever-increasing German opposition his troops were encountering,
forced a postponement. What might have succeeded on the sixth or
seventh seemed risky by the tenth. Eisenhower too was concerned; for
one thing he felt that the launching of an airborne attack at this
juncture would mean a delay in opening the port of Antwerp. Yet the
Supreme Commander remained fascinated by the possibilities of an
airborne attack.

The abortive operations, some of them canceled almost at the last
minute, had created a major problem for Eisenhower. Each time a
mission reached the jump-off stage, troop-carrier planes, hauling
gasoline to the front, had to be grounded and made ready. This loss of
precious air-supply tonnage brought cries of protest from Bradley and
Patton. At this moment of relentless pursuit, the airlift of gasoline,
they declared, was far more vital than airborne missions. Eisenhower,
anxious to use the paratroopers and urged by Washington to do so--both
General Marshall and General Henry H. Arnold, commander of the U.s.
Army air forces, wanted to see what Brereton's new Allied Airborne Army
could accomplish--was not prepared to ground his highly trained
airborne divisions. On the contrary, he was insisting that they be
used at the earliest opportunity. [Pogue, The Supreme Command, p.
280.] In fact, it might be a way to catapult his troops across the
Rhine at the very moment when the pursuit was slowing down. But on
this morning of September 10, as he flew to Brussels, all other
considerations were secondary in his mind to the opening of the vital
port of Antwerp.

Not so Montgomery. Anxious and determined, he was waiting at Brussels
airport as Eisenhower's plane touched down. With characteristic
preciseness, he had honed and refined his arguments preparatory to the
meeting. He had talked with General Miles C. Dempsey of the British
Second Army, and Lieutenant General Frederick Browning, commander of
the British I Airborne Corps, who was also deputy chief of the First
Allied Airborne Army. Browning was waiting in the wings for the
outcome of the conference. Dempsey, concerned at the ever-stiffening
enemy resist-

every before him and aware from the intelligence reports that new units
were moving in, asked Montgomery to abandon the plan for an airborne
attack on the bridge at Arnhem. Instead, he suggested concentrating on
seizing the Rhine crossing at Wesel. Even in conjunction with an
airborne mission, Dempsey contended, the British Second Army probably
was not strong enough to drive due north to Arnhem by itself. It would
be better, he believed, to advance in conjunction with the U.s. First
Army northeast toward Wesel.

A drive into Holland was, in any case, now imperative. The British War
Office had informed Montgomery that V-2's--the first German
rockets--had landed in London on September 8. Their launch sites were
believed to be somewhere in western Holland. Whether before or after
receiving this information, Montgomery altered his plans. Operation
Comet, as originally devised, called for only a division and a
half--the British 1/ Airborne and the Polish 1/ Parachute Brigade; that
force was too weak to be effective, he believed. As a result, he
canceled Comet. In its place, Montgomery came up with an even more
ambitious airborne proposal. As yet, only a few of the Field Marshal's
upper-echelon officers knew about it and, apprehensive of General
Bradley's influence with Eisenhower, they had taken great pains to see
that no hint of the plan reached American liaison officers at the
British headquarters. Like Eisenhower, Lieutenant General Browning and
the headquarters of the First Allied Airborne Army in England were, at
this moment, unaware of Montgomery's new airborne scheme.

Because of his injured knee, Eisenhower was unable to leave his plane,
and the conference was held on board. Montgomery, as he had done on
August 23, determined who should be present at the meeting. The
Supreme Commander had brought his deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur
Tedder, and an assistant chief of staff, Lieutenant General Sir
Humphrey Gale, in charge of administration. Curtly, Montgomery asked
that Eisenhower exclude Gale from the conference while insisting that
his own administrative and supply chief, Lieutenant General Miles
Graham, remain. Another, less acquiescent superior might well have
taken issue

with Montgomery's attitude. Eisenhower patiently granted the Field
Marshal's demand. General Gale left.

Almost immediately Montgomery denounced the Supreme Commander's
broad-front policy. Constantly referring to a sheaf of Eisenhower's
communications that had arrived during the previous week, he called
attention to the Supreme Commander's inconsistencies in not clearly
defining what was meant by "priority." He argued that his 21/ Army
Group was not getting the "priority" in supplies promised by
Eisenhower; that Patton's drive to the Saar was being allowed to
proceed at the expense of Montgomery's forces. Calmly Eisenhower
answered that he had never meant to give Montgomery "absolute priority"
to the exclusion of everyone else. Eisenhower's strategy, Montgomery
reiterated, was wrong and would have "dire consequences." So long as
these two "jerky and disjointed thrusts were continued," with supplies
split between himself and Patton, "neither could succeed." It was
essential, Montgomery said, that Eisenhower decide between him and
Patton. So fierce and unrestrained was Montgomery's language that
Eisenhower suddenly reached out, patted Montgomery's knee and told him,
"Steady, Monty! You can't speak to me like that. I'm your boss."
Montgomery's anger vanished. "I'm sorry, Ike," he said quietly. * *
In his memoirs, Montgomery, in discussing the meeting, says that "we
had a good talk." But he does state that, during these days of
strategy arguments, "Possibly I went a bit far in urging on him my own
plan, and did not give sufficient weight to the heavy political burden
he bore. ... Looking back on it all I often wonder if I paid
sufficient heed to Eisenhower's notions before refuting them. I think
I did. Anyhow ... I never cease to marvel at his patience and
forbearance. ..."

The uncharacteristic but seemingly genuine apology was not the end of
the matter. Doggedly, though with less acrimony, Montgomery continued
to argue for his "single thrust." Eisenhower listened intently and
with sympathy to the arguments, but his own view remained unchanged.
His broad-front advance would continue. He told Montgomery clearly
why. As Eisenhower was later to recall, [To the author.] he said,
"What you're proposing is this--if I give you all of the supplies you
want, you could go straight to Berlin--right straight to Berlin?
Monty, you're nuts.

You can't do it. What the hell! If you try a long column like that in
a single thrust you'd have to throw off division after division to
protect your flanks from attack. Now suppose you did get a bridge
across the Rhine. You couldn't depend for long on that one bridge to
supply your drive. Monty, you can't do it."

Montgomery, according to Eisenhower, replied, "I'll supply them all
right. Just give me what I need and I'll reach Berlin and end the
war."

Eisenhower's rejection was firm. Antwerp, he stressed, must be opened
before any major drive into Germany could even be contemplated.
Montgomery then played his trump card. The most recent
development--the rocket attack on London from sites in the
Netherlands-- necessitated an immediate advance into Holland. He knew
exactly how such a drive should begin. To strike into Germany,
Montgomery proposed to use almost the entire First Allied Airborne Army
in a stunning mass attack.

His plan was an expanded, grandiose version of Operation Comet.
Montgomery now wanted to use three and a half divisions--the U.s. 82nd
and 101/, the British 1/ Airborne and the Polish 1/ Parachute Brigade.
The airborne forces were to seize a succession of river crossings in
Holland ahead of his troops, with the major objective being the Lower
Rhine bridge at Arnhem. Anticipating that the Germans would expect him
to take the shortest route and drive northeast for the Rhine and the
Ruhr, Montgomery had deliberately chosen a northern "back door" route
to the Reich. The surprise airborne attack would open a corridor for
the tanks of his British Second Army, which would race across the
captured bridges to Arnhem, over the Rhine and beyond. Once all this
was accomplished, Montgomery could wheel east, outflank the Siegfried
Line, and dash into the Ruhr.

Eisenhower was intrigued and impressed. It was a bold, brilliantly
imaginative plan, exactly the kind of mass attack he had been seeking
for his long-idle airborne divisions. But now the Supreme Commander
was caught between the hammer and the anvil: if he agreed to the
attack, the opening of Antwerp would temporarily have to be delayed and
supplies diverted from Patton. Yet, Montgomery's proposal could
revitalize the dying ad- vance and perhaps propel the pursuit across
the Rhine and into the Ruhr. Eisenhower, fascinated by the
audaciousness of the plan, not only gave his approval, * but insisted
that the operation take place at the earliest possible moment. *
Eisenhower told Stephen E. Ambrose, according to his book, The Supreme
Commander, p. 518 fn.: "I not only approved ... I insisted upon it.
What we needed was a bridgehead over the Rhine. If that could be
accomplished, I was quite willing to wait on all other operations
..."

Yet the Supreme Commander stressed that the attack was a "limited one."
And he emphasized to Montgomery that he considered the combined
airborne-ground operation "merely an extension of the northern advance
to the Rhine and the Ruhr." As Eisenhower remembered the conversation,
he said to Montgomery, "I'll tell you what I'll do, Monty. I'll give
you whatever you ask to get you over the Rhine because I want a
bridgehead ... but let's get over the Rhine first before we discuss
anything else." Montgomery continued to argue, but Eisenhower would
not budge. Frustrated, the Field Marshal had to accept what he called
a "half measure," and on this note the conference ended.

After Eisenhower's departure, Montgomery outlined the proposed
operation on a map for Lieutenant General Browning. The elegant
Browning, one of Britain's pioneer airborne advocates, saw that the
paratroopers and glider-borne forces were being called upon to secure a
series of crossings--five of them major bridges including the wide
rivers of the Maas, the Waal and the Lower Rhine--over a stretch
approximately sixty-four miles long between the Dutch border and
Arnhem. Additionally, they were charged with holding open the
corridor--in most places a single highway running north--over which
British armor would drive. All of the bridges had to be seized intact
if the armored dash was to succeed. The dangers were obvious, but this
was precisely the kind of surprise assault for which the airborne
forces had been trained. Still, Browning was uneasy. Pointing to the
most northern bridge over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem, he asked, "How
long will it take the armor to reach us?" Montgomery replied briskly,
"Two days." Still intent on the map, Browning said, "We can hold it
for four." Then he added, "But sir, I think we might be going a bridge
too far."

The embryo concept (which thereafter would bear the code name
"Operation Market-Garden"-- "Market" covering the airborne drop and
"Garden" for the armored drive) was to be developed with the utmost
speed, Montgomery ordered. He insisted that the attack had to be
launched in a few days. Otherwise, he told Browning, it would be too
late. Montgomery asked: "How soon can you get ready?" Browning, at
this moment, could only hazard a guess. "The earliest scheduling of
the operation would be the fifteenth or sixteenth," * he told the Field
Marshal. * Minutes of the first planning meeting, First Allied
Airborne Army operational file 1014-1017.

Carrying Montgomery's skeleton plan and weighed with the urgency of
preparing for such a massive mission in only a few days, Browning flew
back to England immediately. On landing at his Moor Park Golf Course
base near Rickmansworth on the outskirts of London, he telephoned the
First Allied Airborne headquarters, twenty miles away, and notified the
commander, Lieutenant General Brereton, and his chief of staff,
Brigadier General Floyd L. Parks. The time was 2:30 P.m., and Parks
noted that Browning's message contained "the first mention of "Market"
at this headquarters."

The airborne commanders were not the only officers caught unaware.
Montgomery's daring plan so impressed and surprised the Field Marshal's
greatest critic, General Omar N. Bradley, that he later recalled, "Had
the pious, teetotalling Montgomery wobbled into SHAEF with a hangover,
I could not have been more astonished. ... Although I never reconciled
myself to the venture, I nevertheless freely concede that it was one of
the most imaginative of the war." * * General Omar N. Bradley, A
Soldier's Story, p. 416. Bradley also added, "I had not been brought
into the plan. In fact, Montgomery devised and sold it to Ike several
days before I even learned of it from our own liaison officer at 21/
Army Group."

It was, but Montgomery remained unhappy. He now prodded

the Supreme Commander even further, reverting to the cautious,
perfectionist thinking that was characteristic of his military career.
Unless the 21/ Army Group received additional supplies and transport
for the "selected thrust," Montgomery warned Eisenhower, Market-Garden
could not be launched before September 23 at the earliest, and might
even be delayed until September 26. Browning had estimated that Market
could be ready by the fifteenth or sixteenth, but Montgomery was
concerned about Garden, the land operation. Once again he was
demanding what he had always wanted: absolute priority, which to his
mind would guarantee success. Eisenhower noted in his desk diary for
September 12: "Monty's suggestion is simple--"give him every thing.""
Fearing that any delay might jeopardize Market-Garden, Eisenhower
complied. He promptly sent his chief of staff, General Bedell Smith,
to see Montgomery; Smith assured the Field Marshal of a thousand tons
of supplies per day plus transport. Additionally, Montgomery was
promised that Patton's drive to the Saar would be checked. Elated at
the "electric" response--as the Field Marshal called it--Montgomery
believed he had finally won the Supreme Commander over to his point of
view.

Although opposition before Montgomery's troops had stiffened, he
believed that the Germans in Holland, behind the hard crust of their
front lines, had little strength. Allied intelligence confirmed his
estimate. Eisenhower's headquarters reported "few infantry reserves"
in the Netherlands, and even these were considered to be "troops of low
category." The enemy, it was thought, was still "disorganized after
his long and hasty retreat ... and though there might be numerous small
bodies of Germans in the area," they were hardly capable of any great
organized resistance. Montgomery now believed he could quickly crack
the German defenses. Then, once he was over the Rhine and headed for
the Ruhr, he did not see how Eisenhower could halt his drive. The
Supreme Commander would have little choice, he reasoned, but to let him
continue toward Berlin --thus ending the war, as Montgomery put it,
"reasonably quickly." Confidently, Montgomery set Sunday, September
17, as D Day for

Operation Market-Garden. The brilliant scheme he had devised was to
become the greatest airborne operation of the entire war.

Not everyone shared Montgomery's certainty about Market-Garden. At
least one of his senior officers had reason to be worried. General
Miles Dempsey, commander of the British Second Army, unlike the Field
Marshal, did not dispute the authenticity of Dutch resistance reports.
From these, Dempsey's intelligence staff had put together a picture
indicating rapidly increasing German strength between Eindhoven and
Arnhem, in the very area of the planned airborne drop. There was even
a Dutch report that "battered panzer formations have been sent to
Holland to refit," and these too were said to be in the Market-Garden
area. Dempsey sent along this news to Browning's British I Airborne
Corps, but the information lacked any back-up endorsement by Montgomery
or his staff. The ominous note was not even included in intelligence
summaries. In fact, in the mood of optimism prevailing at 21/ Army
Group headquarters, the report was completely discounted.

Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's high-risk gamble to rescue the
remains of General Von Zangen's encircled Fifteenth Army in the Pas de
Calais was paying off. Under cover of darkness, ever since September
6, a hastily assembled fleet consisting of two ancient Dutch
freighters, several Rhine barges and some small

boats and rafts had been plying back and forth across the three-mile
mouth of the Schelde estuary ferrying men, artillery, vehicles and even
horses.

Although powerful coastal guns on Walcheren Island protected against
attack from the sea, the Germans were surprised that Allied naval
forces made no effort to interfere. Major General Walter Poppe
expected the convoy carrying his splintered 59th Infantry Division to
be "blown out of the water." To him the one-hour trip between Breskens
and Flushing "in completely darkened ships, exposed and defenseless,
was a most unpleasant experience." The Allies, the Germans suspected,
completely underestimated the size of the evacuation. Certainly they
knew about it. Because both Von Rundstedt and Army Group B's
commander, Field Marshal Walter Model, desperately in need of
reinforcements, were demanding speed, some daylight trips had been
made. Immediately, fighters pounced on the small convoys. Darkness,
however unpleasant, was much safer.

The most hazardous part of the journey was on the Schelde's northern
bank. There, under the constant threat of Allied air attack, Von
Zangen's forces had to follow a single main road, running east from
Walcheren Island, across the Beveland peninsula and into Holland. Part
of the escape route, at the narrow neck joining the mainland, was only
a few miles from Antwerp and British lines on the Albert Canal.
Inexplicably the British even now made no serious effort to attack
north, spring the trap, and cut the base of the isthmus. The escape
route remained open. Although hammered by incessant Allied air attacks
Von Zangen's Fifteenth Army would eventually reach Holland--at a most
crucial moment for Montgomery's Market-Garden operation.

While the Fifteenth Army had been extricated more by calculated design
than by luck, now the opposite occurred: fate, the unexpected and
unpredictable, took a hand. Some eighty miles away the battered
armored units of Lieutenant General Wilhelm Bittrich's elite, veteran
II SS Panzer Corps reached bivouac areas in the vicinity of Arnhem. As
directed by Field Marshal Model on September 4, Bittrich had slowly
disengaged the 9th and 10th SS

Panzer divisions for "refitting and rehabilitation." Model had chosen
the Arnhem area. The two reduced, but still tough, divisions were
fanned out to the north, east and south of the town. Bittrich assigned
the 9th SS to a huge rectangular sector north and northeast of Arnhem,
where most of the division's men and vehicles were on high ground and
conveniently hidden in a densely wooded national park. The 10th was
encamped in a semicircle to the northeast, east and southeast. Thus;
camouflaged and hidden in nearby woods, villages and towns
--Beekbergen, Apeldoorn, Zutphen, Ruurlo and Doetinchem--both divisions
were within striking distance of Arnhem; some units were within a mile
or two of the suburbs. As Bittrich was later to recall, "there was no
particular significance in Model choosing the Arnhem vicinity--except
that it was a peaceful sector where nothing was happening."

The possibility that this remote backwater might have any strategic
value to the Allies was obviously discounted. On the morning of
September 11, a small group of Model's staff officers was dispatched in
search of a new site for Army Group B's headquarters--in Arnhem.

One of Model's aides, his general headquarters administration and
transportation officer, thirty-five-year-old Lieutenant Gustav
Sedelhauser, later remembered that "we visited the 9th and 10th SS
division headquarters at Beekbergen and Ruurlo and General Bittrich's
command post at Doetinchem. Then we inspected Arnhem itself. It had
everything we wanted: a fine road net and excellent accommodations.
But it was not until we drove west to the outlying district of
Oosterbeek that we found what we were looking for." In the wealthy,
residential village just two and a half miles from the center of Arnhem
was a group of hotels, among them the gracious, white Hartenstein, with
its broad expanse of crescent-shaped lawn, stretching back into
parklike surroundings where deer roamed undisturbed, and the smaller,
two-story, tree-shaded Tafelberg with its glassed-in veranda and
paneled rooms. Impressed by the facilities and, as Sedelhauser
recalled, "especially the accommodations," the group promptly
recommended

Oosterbeek to the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Hans Krebs, as
"perfect for Army Group B's headquarters." Model approved the
decision. Part of the staff, he decided, would live at the
Hartenstein, while he would occupy the more secluded, less ostentatious
Tafelberg. Lieutenant Sedelhauser was delighted. Since his tenure the
headquarters had never remained anywhere for more than a few days, and
now Sedelhauser "was looking forward to some peace and a chance to get
my laundry done." By September 15, Model directed, Army Group B's
headquarters was to be fully operational in Oosterbeek--approximately
three miles from the broad expanse of heaths and pastureland where the
British 1/ Airborne Division was due to land on September 17.

Part Two THE PLAN

In the early evening of September 10, within hours of General
Browning's meeting with Field Marshal Montgomery, Lieutenant General
Lewis H. Brereton held the first basic planning conference on Operation
Market. At his Sunninghill Park headquarters near the fashionable
Ascot racecourse thirty-five miles from London, twenty-seven senior
officers crowded into Brereton's large map-lined office. After General
Browning briefed the group on Montgomery's plan, Brereton told them
that, because there was so little time, "major decisions arrived at now
must stand--and these have to be made immediately."

The task was monumental, and there were few guidelines. Never before
had there been an attempt to send a mammoth airborne force, complete
with vehicles, artillery and equipment, capable of fighting on its own,
deep behind enemy front lines. In comparison with Market, previous
airborne attacks had been small; yet months had gone into their
planning. Now, to prepare for the greatest paratroop and glider-borne
infantry operation ever conceived, Brereton and his planners had barely
seven days.

Brereton's greatest concern was not the deadline, but the possibility
that this operation, like its predecessors, might be canceled. His
long-idle airborne troops were impatient for action, and a serious
morale problem had developed as a consequence. For weeks his elite,
highly trained divisions had stood down while ground forces on the
Continent swept victoriously across France

and Belgium. There was a widespread feeling that victory was so near
that the war might end before the First Allied Airborne Army got into
battle.

The General harbored no doubts about the ability of his staff to meet
the tight, one-week Market schedule. There had been so many "dry runs"
in developing previous airborne schemes that his headquarters and
division staffs had reached a stage of high-speed efficiency.
Additionally, much of the planning that had gone into Comet and other
canceled operations could be readily adapted to Market. In preparing
for the aborted Comet mission, for example, the British 1/ Airborne
Division and the Polish Brigade, charged with that operation, had made
a thorough study of the Arnhem area. Still, most of the Market concept
meant vastly expanded planning-- and all of it was time-consuming.

General Brereton was outwardly confident and calm, but members of his
staff noted that he smoked one cigarette after another. On his desk
was a framed quotation which the General often pointed out to his
staff. It read: "Where is the Prince who can afford so to cover his
country with troops for its defense, as that 10,000 men descending from
the clouds, might not, in many places, do an infinite deal of mischief
before a force could be brought together to repel them?" It had been
written in 1784 by Benjamin Franklin.

Brereton was fascinated by the vision of the eighteenth-century
statesman and scientist. "Even after a hundred sixty years," he had
told his staff, "the idea remains the same." But Franklin would have
been bewildered by the complexities and size of Operation Market. To
invade Holland from the sky, Brereton planned to land almost 35,000
men--nearly twice the number of paratroops and glider-borne infantry
used in the invasion of Normandy.

To "grab the bridges with thunderclap surprise," as Brereton put it,
and hold open the narrow, one-highway advance corridor for the British
Garden ground forces--from their attack line near the Dutch-Belgian
border to Arnhem sixty-four miles north-- three and one half airborne
divisions were to be used. Two would

be American. Almost directly ahead of General Horrocks' XXX Corps
tanks, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor's 101/ Airborne Division was to
capture canal and river crossings over a fifteen-mile stretch between
Eindhoven and Veghel. North of them, Brigadier General James M.
Gavin's veteran 82nd Division was charged with the area between Grave
and the city of Nijmegen, approximately a ten-mile stretch. They were
to seize crossings over the great Maas and Waal rivers, in particular
the huge multispan bridge at Nijmegen, which, with its approaches, was
almost a half-mile long. The single most important objective of
Operation Market-Garden was Arnhem and its vital crossing over the
400-yard-wide Lower Rhine. The great concrete-and-steel, three-span
highway bridge, together with its concrete ramps, was almost 2,000 feet
long. Its capture was assigned to the British and Poles--Major General
Robert "Roy" E. Urquhart's 1/ Airborne Division and, under his command,
Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski's Polish 1/ Parachute Brigade.
Arnhem, lying farthest away from the Garden forces, was the prize.
Without the Rhine crossing, Montgomery's bold stroke to liberate
Holland, outflank the Siegfried Line and springboard into Germany's
industrial Ruhr would fail.

To carry the huge force to targets three hundred miles away, an
intricate air plan had to be designed. Three distinct operations were
required: transportation, protection and resupply. No fewer than
twenty-four different airfields would be needed for takeoff. Brereton
planned to use every operable glider in his command--an immense fleet
of more than 2,500. Besides hauling heavy equipment such as jeeps and
artillery, the gliders were to ferry more than a third of the
35,000-man force; the rest would drop by parachute. All the craft had
to be checked out, loading space allotted, heavy equipment and cargo
stowed, and troop complements prepared.

Gliders posed only a single problem in the air planning. Transports to
carry paratroops and tow planes to pull the gliders must be diverted
from their normal task of supplying the advancing armies and grounded
in order to be readied for Market. The

crews of bomber squadrons had to be alerted and briefed for missions in
the Market-Garden area prior to, and during, the attack. Swarms of
fighter squadrons from all over England--more than 1,500 planes--would
be needed to escort the airborne force. Intricate aerial traffic
patterns were of prime importance. Routes between England and Holland
had to be laid out to avoid heavy enemy antiaircraft fire and the
equally dangerous possibility of air collision. Air-sea rescue
operations, resupply missions, even a dummy parachute drop in another
area of Holland to deceive the enemy, were also planned. In all, it
was estimated that almost 5,000 aircraft of all types would be involved
in Market. To develop plans and ready this vast air armada would take
a minimum of seventy-two hours.

The most pressing question of the conference, in Brereton's opinion,
was whether the operation should be undertaken by day or by night.
Previous major airborne operations had taken place in moonlight. But
semidarkness had led to confusion in finding landing zones, lack of
troop concentration and unnecessary casualties. The General decreed
that the huge airborne assault would take place in broad daylight. It
was an unprecedented decision. In the history of airborne operations,
a daylight drop of such proportions had never before been made.

Brereton had other reasons than the desire to avoid confusion. The
week scheduled for Operation Market was a no-moon period and night
landings on a large scale were therefore impossible. Apart from that,
Brereton chose a daylight attack because, for the first time in the
war, it was feasible. Allied fighters held such overwhelming
superiority over the battlefields that now interference from the
Luftwaffe was practically nonexistent. But the Germans did have night
fighters. In a night drop, against columns of slow-moving
troop-carrying planes and gliders, they might prove devastatingly
effective. German antiaircraft strength was another consideration:
flak maps of the approaches to the Market drop areas were dotted with
antiaircraft positions. The charts, based on photo-reconnaissance
flights and the experience of bomber crews flying over Holland en route
to Germany, looked

formidable--particularly so because gliders were without protective
armor, except in the cockpits, and C-47 troop-carriers and tow planes
had no self-sealing gas tanks. Nevertheless, Brereton believed that
enemy antiaircraft positions could be neutralized by concentrated
bomber and fighter attacks preceding and during the assault. In any
event, most antiaircraft was radar-directed, and therefore was as
effective after dark as it was during the day. Either way, losses were
to be expected. Still, unless bad weather and high winds intervened,
the airborne force, by attacking in daylight, could be dropped with
almost pinpoint accuracy on the landing zones, thus guaranteeing a
quick concentration of troops in the corridor. "The advantages,"
Brereton told his commanders, "far outweigh the risks."

Brereton made his final announcement. To command the giant operation
he appointed his deputy, the fastidious forty-seven-year-old Lieutenant
General Frederick "Boy" Browning, head of the British I Airborne Corps.
It was an excellent choice, though disappointing to Lieutenant General
Matthew B. Ridgway, commander of the other corps in the airborne
army--the XVIII Airborne Corps. Still, Browning had been slated to
command the aborted Operation Comet, which, though smaller and
utilizing only British and Polish airborne troops, was similar in
concept to Market-Garden. Now, under the enlarged and innovative plan
Montgomery had devised, American paratroops would serve under a British
airborne commander for the first time.

To the assembled airborne commanders Browning delivered an optimistic
summation. He ended his talk with the kind of picturesque confidence
that had always made him a heroic figure to his men. As his chief of
staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, remembers, "General Browning was in high
spirits, delighted that at last we were going. "The object," he told
us, "is to lay a carpet of airborne troops down over which our ground
forces can pass." He believed this single operation held the key to
the duration of the war."

Browning's enthusiasm was catching. As the large meeting broke up, to
be replaced by smaller staff conferences which would last throughout
the night, few officers were aware that an

underlying friction existed between Brereton and Browning. Originally,
when the First Allied Airborne Army was formed, British hopes ran high
that Browning, Britain's senior airborne authority and one of the
pioneers in the use of paratroops, would be named commander. Because
of the preponderance of American troops and equipment within the newly
organized army, the coveted post went to an American, General
Brereton.

In rank, Browning was six months Brereton's senior; and although the
American was a distinguished tactical air force officer, he had never
before commanded airborne forces. Additionally, there were wide
personality differences between the two men. Brereton had been a World
War I flyer and had served brilliantly in World War II, first in the
Far and Middle East and later as commanding general of the U.s. Ninth
Air Force in England. He was tenacious and single-minded, but his zeal
to achieve was cloaked by a quiet, stolid demeanor. Now Brereton
proceeded on the awesome assignment he had been handed with the
determination and bulldozing tactics that characterized many of his
fellow American career officers.

Browning, a Grenadier Guards officer, was also a perfectionist, equally
determined to prove the worth of paratroops. But he had never
commanded an airborne corps before. In contrast to Brereton, "Boy"
Browning was a somewhat glamorous figure, elegant and impeccably
groomed, with an air of easy assurance often misunderstood for
arrogance, not only by Americans but by some of his own commanders.
Though he was temperamental and sometimes overly impatient, his
reputation as an airborne theorist was legendary among his admirers.
Still, he lacked the battle experience of some other officers, such as
General Richard Gale of the British 6th Airborne Division and the
veteran American commanders, Generals Gavin and Taylor. And, Browning
had yet to prove that he possessed the administrative genius of the
most experienced of all airborne commanders, General Ridgway.

Only days before, an incident had occurred that pointed up the
differences between Brereton and Browning. On September 3, Browning
had protested to Brereton the dangers of trying to

launch an airborne assault on just thirty-six hours' notice. Since D
Day on June 6, seventeen airborne operations had been prepared and
canceled. In the thirty-three days of Brereton's command, in his
eagerness to get into action, plans had been processed at the rate of
almost one a week. None reached the launching stage. Browning,
watching the mass production of airborne schemes, was deeply concerned
about the haste and the risks being run. When Operation Linnet I--a
drop before the British army in Belgium--was canceled on September 2,
Brereton quickly found new objectives ahead of the speeding armies and
proposed Operation Linnet II, as a substitute attack to take place on
the morning of September 4.

As Brereton later recalled the incident, "Browning was quite agitated
about Operation Linnet II in which there was a serious shortage of
information, photographs and, in particular, maps. As a result, "Boy"
claimed his troops could not be briefed properly." Airborne
operations, Browning contended, "should not be attempted on such short
notice." In principle Brereton had agreed, but he had told his deputy
that "the disorganization of the enemy demands that chances be taken."
The disagreement between the two men had ended with Browning stiffly
stating that he intended to submit his protest in writing. A few hours
later his letter had arrived. Because "of our sharp differences of
opinion," Browning wrote, he could no longer "continue as Deputy
Commander of the First Allied Airborne Army." Brereton, unintimidated,
had begun at once to consider the problem of Browning's replacement.
He had alerted General Ridgway to "stand by to take over." The
delicate problem was solved when Operation Linnet II was canceled; the
following day Brereton had persuaded Browning to withdraw his letter of
resignation.

Now, their differences set aside, both men faced the huge, complex task
of preparing Market. Whatever reservations Browning entertained were
now secondary to the job ahead.

There was one decision Brereton could not make at the initial meeting:
exactly how the airborne troops comprising the carpet were to be
carried to the targets. The airborne commanders could

not make detailed plans until this greatest of all problems was solved.
The fact was that the airborne army was only as mobile as the planes
that would carry it. Apart from gliders, Brereton had no transports of
his own. To achieve complete surprise, the ideal plan called for the
three and one-half divisions in Market to be delivered to landing zones
on the same day at the same hour. But the immense size of the
operation ruled out this possibility. There was an acute shortage of
both aircraft and gliders; the planes would have to make more than one
trip. Other factors also forced a different approach. Each division
had separate combat requirements. For example, it was essential that
the transport for General Taylor's 101/ Airborne carry more men than
equipment when the attack began so that the division could carry out
its assigned task of achieving a link-up with the Garden forces within
the first few hours. Also, Taylor's men had to join quickly with the
82nd Airborne on the corridor north of them. There, General Gavin's
troops not only had to secure the formidable bridges across the Maas
and the Waal but also hold the Groesbeek ridge to the southeast,
terrain which had to be denied the Germans because it dominated the
countryside. Gavin's special assignment also imposed special
requirements. Because the 82nd Airborne would have to fight longer
than the 101/ before the link-up occurred, Gavin needed not only troops
but artillery.

Farther north, the problems of the British 1/ Airborne under General
Urquhart were different still. The British 1/ was to hold the Arnhem
bridge until relieved. With luck, German reaction would be sluggish
enough so that ground forces could reach the lightly armed British
troopers before any real enemy strength developed. But until Horrocks'
tanks arrived, Urquhart's men would have to hang on. Urquhart could
not dissipate his strength by sending units south to link up with
Gavin. Lying at the farthest end of the airborne carpet, the British
1/ Airborne would have to hold longer than anyone else. For this
reason, Urquhart's force was the largest, his division bolstered by the
addition of Polish paratroops, plus the 52nd Lowland Division,

which was to be flown in as soon as air strips could be located and
prepared in the Arnhem area.

On the morning of the eleventh, after a hectic night of assessing and
analyzing aircraft availability for the attack, Major General Paul L.
Williams, commander of the U.s. IX Troop Carrier Command, and in charge
of all Market air operations, gave his estimate to Brereton. There was
such a shortage of gliders and planes, he reported, that even with an
all-out effort, at best only half the troop strength of Browning's
total force could be flown in on D Day. Essential items such as
artillery, jeeps and other heavy cargo scheduled for the gliders could
be included only on a strict priority basis. Brereton urged his air
commander to explore the possibility of two D-Day airlifts but the
suggestion was found impractical. "Owing to the reduced hours of
daylight and the distances involved, it would not be possible to
consider more than one lift per day," General Williams said. It was
too risky. There would be no time for maintenance or battle-damage
repair, he pointed out, and almost certainly "casualties would result
from pilot and crew fatigue."

Hamstrung by the shortage of aircraft and the time limit, Brereton made
some general assessments. A full day would be required to take
aerial-reconnaissance photographs of the Dutch bridges and terrain; two
days must go into the preparation and distribution of maps of the
areas; intelligence had to be gathered and analyzed; detailed battle
plans must be prepared. The most crucial decision of all: Brereton was
forced to tailor the Market plan to suit the existing airlift
capability. He must transport his force in installments, flying the
three and one half divisions to their targets over a period of three
days. The risks were great: German reinforcements might reach the
Market-Garden area faster than anyone anticipated; antiaircraft fire
could intensify; and there was always the possibility of bad weather.
Fog, high winds, a sudden storm--all likely at this time of the
year--could cause disaster.

Worse, once on the ground, the paratroopers and glider-borne

infantry, arriving without heavy artillery or tanks, would be highly
vulnerable. General Horrocks' XXX Corps tank columns, using one narrow
highway, could not make the 64-mile dash to Arnhem and beyond unless
Brereton's men seized the bridges and held open the advance route.
Conversely, the airborne army had to be relieved at top speed. Cut off
far behind enemy lines and dependent on supplies by air, the airborne
forces could expect German reinforcements to increase with each passing
day. At best the beleaguered troopers might hold out in their
"airheads" for only a few days. If the British armored drive was held
up or failed to move fast enough, the airborne troops would inevitably
be overrun and destroyed.

More could go wrong. If General Taylor's "Screaming Eagles" failed to
secure the bridges directly ahead of the British Second Army's tank
spearheads, it would make little difference whether or not the men
under General Gavin's or General Urquhart's command secured their
objectives in Nijmegen and Arnhem. Their forces would be isolated.

Certain classic airborne risks had to be accepted: divisions might be
dropped or landed by gliders in the wrong areas; crossings might be
destroyed by the enemy even as the attack began; bad weather could make
air resupply impossible; and even if all the bridges were seized, the
corridor might be cut at any point. These were but a few of the
imponderables. The planners were gambling on speed, boldness, accuracy
and surprise--all deriving from a precise synchronized
land-and-airborne plan that, in its turn, gambled on German
disorganization and inadequate strength. Each link in Market-Garden
was interlocked with the next. If one gave way, disaster might result
for all.

In Brereton's opinion, such risks had to be accepted. The opportunity
might never arise again. Additionally, on the basis of the latest
information of enemy strength, from Montgomery's 21/ Army Group, Allied
Airborne headquarters still felt that Brereton's forces would meet an
"ill-organized enemy of varying standards." It was not expected that
"any mobile force larger than a brigade group [about 3,000 men] with
very few tanks and guns

could be concentrated against the airborne troops before relief by the
ground forces." It was expected "that the flight and landings would be
hazardous, that the capture intact of the bridge objectives was more a
matter of surprise and confusion than hard fighting." There was
nothing here that the planners had not already taken under
consideration. The last words of the intelligence summation seemed
almost superfluous-- "the advance of the ground forces would be very
swift if the airborne operations were successful."

Major Brian Urquhart was deeply disturbed by the optimism permeating
General Browning's British I Airborne Corps headquarters. The
twenty-five-year-old intelligence chief felt that he was probably the
only one on the staff with any doubts about Market-Garden. Urquhart
(no relation to the British 1/ Airborne Division commander, Major
General Robert Urquhart) did not believe the optimistic estimates on
enemy strength which arrived almost daily from Montgomery's 21/ Army
command. By the morning of Tuesday, September 12, with D Day only five
days away, his doubts about Market-Garden amounted to near-panic.

His feeling had been triggered by a cautious message from General
Dempsey's British Second Army headquarters. Quoting a Dutch report,
Dempsey's intelligence staff warned of an increase in German strength
in the Market-Garden area and spoke of the presence of "battered panzer
formations believed to be in Holland to refit." Admittedly, the
information was vague. Lacking any kind of confirmation, Dempsey's
report was not included in the latest intelligence summaries of either
Montgomery's or Eisenhower's headquarters. Urquhart could not
understand why. He had been receiving similar disquieting news from
Dutch liaison officers at Corps headquarters itself. And, like General
Dempsey's staff, he believed them. Adding his own information to that
received from Dempsey's command, Major Urquhart felt reasonably certain
that elements of at least two panzer divisions were

somewhere in the Arnhem area. The evidence was thin. The units were
unidentified, with strength unknown, and he could not tell whether they
were actually being refitted or merely passing through Arnhem.
Nevertheless, Urquhart, as he later recalled, "was really very shook
up."

Ever since the inception of Operation Comet and its evolution into
Market-Garden, Major Urquhart's fears had been growing. Repeatedly, he
had voiced his objections to the operation to "anybody who would listen
on the staff." He was "quite frankly horrified by Market-Garden,
because its weakness seemed to be the assumption that the Germans would
put up no effective resistance." Urquhart himself was convinced that
the Germans were rapidly recovering and might well have more men and
equipment in Holland than anyone realized. Yet the whole essence of
the scheme, as he saw it, "depended on the unbelievable notion that
once the bridges were captured, XXX Corps's tanks could drive up this
abominably narrow corridor--which was little more than a causeway,
allowing no maneuverability --and then walk into Germany like a bride
into a church. I simply did not believe that the Germans were going to
roll over and surrender."

At planning conferences, Major Urquhart became increasingly alarmed at
what he saw as "the desperate desire on everybody's part to get the
airborne into action." There were constant comparisons between the
current situation and the collapse of the Germans in 1918. Urquhart
remembers that General Browning, perhaps reflecting Montgomery's views
and those of "several other British commanders, was thinking about
another great breakthrough." It seemed to the worried intelligence
officer that everyone around him thought the war would be over by
winter and "the Arnhem attack might be the airborne's last chance of
getting into action." Urquhart was appalled at the lighthearted
metaphor--"it was described as a "party""--used in reference to
Market-Garden. And, in particular, he was upset by General Browning's
statement that the object of the airborne attack was to "lay a carpet
of airborne troops down over which our ground forces can pass." He
believed that "that single clich`e had the

psychological effect of lulling many commanders into a passive and
absolutely unimaginative state of mind in which no reaction to German
resistance, apart from dogged gallantry, was envisaged." He considered
the atmosphere at headquarters so unrealistic that, at one of the
planning conferences, he asked "whether the "carpet" was to consist of
live airborne troops or dead ones."

"It was absolutely impossible," he said later, "to get them to face the
realities of the situation; their personal longing to get into the
campaign before it ended completely blinded them." But young Urquhart
was convinced that General Dempsey's warning was accurate. He believed
there was German armor in the vicinity of Arnhem, but he needed to
substantiate the report by getting more evidence. A Spitfire fighter
squadron equipped with special cameras for taking oblique pictures was
stationed, Urquhart knew, at nearby Benson in Oxfordshire. The
squadron was currently searching out rocket sites along the Dutch
coast.

On the afternoon of September 12, Major Urquhart requested low-level
R.a.f. reconnaissance sweeps of the Arnhem area. To avoid detection,
enemy tanks would be hidden in forests or beneath camouflaged netting
and might well escape high-altitude photographic flights. Urquhart's
request was acknowledged; low-level missions would be flown over the
Arnhem area, and he would get the results as fast as possible.
Photographs of the tanks, if they were there, might prove to all
concerned that Major Urquhart's fears were justified.

There was too little time now for airborne division commanders to check
out intelligence reports firsthand. They were dependent on Corps or
First Allied Airborne headquarters for the latest estimates. From
experience, each commander knew that even this information would be
several days old by the time he received it. Still, in the general
view, there was little reason to anticipate any powerful enemy
resistance. The risks involved in Market-Garden were, as a result,
considered acceptable.

Once Generals Brereton and Browning had outlined the plan, determined
the objectives and decided on airlift capability, each commander
developed his own combat plans. The choice of drop zones and landing
sites had priority. From previous operations, veteran airborne
commanders knew that the best chance of success depended on how close
to their objectives assaulting troops could be dropped. Ideally, they
should be landed almost on their targets or within quick marching
distance, especially if they were expected to seize a bridge. With the
meager ground transport available, the pinpointing of these sites was
vital.

Major General Maxwell D. Taylor was all too aware that his sites must
be chosen for maximum effect. While Taylor would have the majority of
his Screaming Eagle paratroops on D Day, his engineering units,
artillery and most of the 101/ transport would not arrive until D plus
1 and 2. Studying the southernmost part of the corridor where the 101/
Airborne Division was to hold between Eindhoven and Veghel, Taylor
quickly noted that over the fifteen-mile stretch of highway, his troops
must capture two major canal crossings and no less than nine highway
and railroad bridges. At Veghel, over the river Aa and the Willems
Canal, there were four bridges, one a major canal crossing. Five miles
south in St. Oedenrode, a bridge over the Lower Dommel had to be
seized; four miles from there was the second major canal crossing, over
the Wilhelmina Canal near the village of Son, and to the west a bridge
near the hamlet of Best. Five miles farther south in Eindhoven, four
bridges over the Upper Dommel had to be taken.

After studying the flat terrain between Eindhoven and Veghel, with its
veining waterways, dikes, ditches and tree-lined roads, Taylor decided
to pinpoint his major landing site almost in the center of his assault
area, by the edge of a forest barely one and one half miles from Son
and roughly equidistant between Eindhoven and Veghel. He would land
two of his regiments, the 502nd and the 506th, on this zone. The 502nd
was charged with objectives in St. Oedenrode and Best; the 506th with
those in Son and Eindhoven. The third regiment, the 501/, was to land
in two

areas north and west of Veghel, within a few hundred yards of the vital
four bridges. It was a formidable assignment for his men to accomplish
on D Day without their back-up auxiliary units, but Taylor believed
that "with luck, we can make it."

The task of the 82nd Airborne was more intricate. Its ten-mile sector
was wider than that of the 101/. In this central segment of the
corridor, the huge, nine-span, 1,500-foot-long bridge over the Maas
river at Grave and at least one of four smaller railroad and highway
crossings over the Maas-Waal Canal must be seized. The great bridge
over the Waal river at Nijmegen, almost in the center of this city of
90,000, was also a prime objective. None of these could be called
"secured" unless the Groesbeek Heights, dominating the area two miles
southwest of Nijmegen, were held. Also, to the east was the great belt
of forest along the German border --the Reichswald--where the Germans
might assemble for attack. When General Gavin explained to his
headquarters' officers what was expected of them, his chief of staff,
Colonel Robert H. Wienecke, protested, "We'll need two divisions to do
all that." Gavin was terse. "There it is, and we're going to do it
with one."

Remembering the 82nd Airborne's attacks in Sicily and Italy, when his
troops were scattered sometimes as far as thirty-five miles from their
drop zone (the standard division joke was that "we always use blind
pilots"), Gavin was determined to land his men this time almost on
their targets. In order of priority, he decided that his objectives
were: first, the Groesbeek Heights; second, the bridge at Grave; third,
the crossings on the Maas-Waal Canal; and fourth, the Waal bridge at
Nijmegen. "Because of probable quick enemy reaction," Gavin later
recalled, "I decided to drop the largest part of my paratroops between
the Groesbeek Heights and the Reichswald." He chose two landing zones
in the Groesbeek vicinity less than a mile and a half from the ridge
itself and three to four miles southwest of Nijmegen. There, his 508th
and 505th regiments, plus the headquarters staff, would land. The
third regiment, the 504th, was to drop on the western side of the
Groesbeek Heights in the triangle between the

Maas river and the Maas-Waal Canal, a mile from the eastern end of the
Grave bridge and two miles west of the Maas-Waal Canal bridges. To
insure the capture of the vital Grave bridge, which might be prepared
for demolition, an additional phase of his plan was developed in which
a company of the 504th was to be dropped a half mile from the western
end of the bridge. Before the enemy could retaliate, the 504th would
rush the bridge from both ends.

Obviously, the great Nijmegen bridge was the most important of all his
objectives and crucial to the entire Market-Garden operation. Yet
Gavin was well aware that, without holding the other objectives, the
Waal river crossing by itself would be useless. General Browning
agreed with him. If the first bridges were not taken or if the enemy
held the Groesbeek Heights, the corridor for the Garden forces would
never be opened. Therefore, Browning specifically directed, Gavin was
not to attempt an attack on the Nijmegen bridge until the primary
objectives were secured.

Although he was concerned about the wide dispersal of his troops, Gavin
was satisfied with the plan. One aspect bothered him, as it had
bothered Taylor. His entire division would not be organically complete
until supporting units arrived on D plus 1 and 2, and he wondered how
his men --who knew nothing about Market-Garden as yet-- would react.
Still, in the experienced 82nd, morale was high as always; many of his
men had made three combat jumps already. "Jumping Jim" Gavin, at
thirty-seven the youngest brigadier general in the U.s. Army, had no
doubts that his "fugitives from the law of averages," as they called
themselves, would do their job.

The most difficult and dangerous assignment, by far, had been given to
a modest, reticent career officer, Major General Robert "Roy" Urquhart,
forty-two-year-old commander of the British 1/ Airborne Division and
the attached Polish Brigade.

Unlike General Browning and his American colleagues, Urquhart, a highly
professional soldier who had fought with great distinction in North
Africa, Sicily and Italy, had no airborne

warfare experience. He would be commanding an airborne division in
battle for the first time. Browning had chosen him because he was "hot
from battle," but Urquhart had been surprised at his appointment. He
had always considered airborne units "tightly knit organizations,
closed family affairs and quite exclusive." Yet Urquhart had
confidence in his ability to lead the elite unit. Once the force was
on the ground the basic fighting rules remained the same, and he viewed
his airborne division as "very highly trained infantry troops."

Despite his long combat experience, Urquhart was bothered about one
thing: he had never parachuted or been in a glider. "I was even prone
to airsickness," he was later to remark. On taking command in January,
1944, nine months before, Urquhart had suggested to General Browning
that perhaps, as the new division commander, he ought to have some
parachute training. Browning, who impressed Urquhart as a "lithe,
immaculately turned-out man who gave the appearance of a restless
hawk," answered that Urquhart's job was to get his division ready for
an invasion of the Continent. Looking over the six-foot, 200-pound
Scotsman, Browning added, "Leave the parachuting to younger chaps. Not
only are you too large, but you're getting on." * * At their first
interview Urquhart was still wearing his Brigadier's badges and
tight-fitting Tartan trousers (trews) and spats of the Highland
Division. As the meeting broke up, Browning, pointing to Urquhart's
pants, said, "You might also get yourself properly dressed and get rid
of those trews."

Throughout the long months of training, Urquhart "often felt like an
outsider, a kind of military landlubber." He was aware of "being
watched closely; not with hostility, though some airborne officers had
reservations and a few did not bother to conceal them. I was on trial;
my actions were being judged. It was an unenviable position, but one I
accepted." Slowly, Urquhart's confident, assured handling of the
division won over his officers. And among the troopers, Urquhart was
far more popular than he knew. Private James W. Sims, of the 1/
Airborne Division's 1/ Parachute Brigade, remembers "the General's
supreme confidence and his calmness." Sergeant John Rate, of Division
headquarters, had the impression that "General Urquhart did whatever
job had

to be done. He didn't just ask someone else to do it. The General
didn't stand on ceremony." Signalman Kenneth John Pearce called him "a
big wonderful fellow. He called us "son" or used our first names if he
knew them." And from Sergeant Roy Ernest Hatch, of the Glider Pilot
Regiment, Urquhart earned the supreme compliment. "He was," Hatch
asserted, "a bloody general who didn't mind doin' the job of a
sergeant."

To Urquhart's frustration, his division had not been chosen for the
Normandy invasion, and "the summer passed interminably, planning one
operation after another, only to see each canceled." Now, his "Red
Devils" were "hungering for a fight." They had almost given up. "We
were calling ourselves "The Stillborn Division,"" recalls Major George
S. Powell of the 4th Parachute Brigade. "We figured we were being kept
in reserve for use in the victory parade." As Urquhart saw it, "there
was a dangerous mixture of ennui and cynicism slowly creeping into our
lives. We were trained to a fine edge and I knew that if we didn't get
into battle soon, we would lose it. We were ready and willing to
accept anything, with all the "ifs.""

Urquhart's principal target--the prize of Operation Market-Garden--was
Arnhem's concrete-and-steel highway bridge over the Lower Rhine.
Additionally, Urquhart's men had two secondary objectives: a nearby
floating pontoon bridge and a double-track railway crossing upriver,
two and a half miles west of the town.

Urquhart's assignment presented a series of problems. Two were
particularly worrisome. Reports of heavy antiaircraft defenses in the
area indicated that some enemy units were massing in the vicinity of
the Arnhem bridge itself. And Urquhart was uneasy about the three days
it would take to airlift his entire force of British and Polish
paratroops to their objectives. Both these problems had a direct
bearing on Urquhart's choice of landing sites. Unlike the 82nd and
101/ Airborne Divisions, he could not pick zones almost on or even
close to the principal target. Ideally, he should land his forces near
the Arnhem bridge on both sides of the river; but Urquhart's terrain
was by no means ideal.

The northern exit of the crossing ran directly into the densely
populated, built-up center of Arnhem itself. Near the southern exit,
low-level polder land was, according to reports, too marshy for men or
gliders. "Many of my own commanders," Urquhart remembers, "were quite
willing to land on the southern side, even though it was marshy.
Indeed, some were ready to risk injury by parachuting on the northern
side--on the town itself."

In the previous week, bomber crews returning from other missions had
reported a 30 percent increase in antiaircraft fire near the Arnhem
crossing and from Deelen airfield seven miles to the north.
Consequently, R.a.f. commanders whose pilots were scheduled to tow
Urquhart's glider-borne troops raised strong objections to landing
zones close to the Arnhem bridge. If sites were located near the
southern exit, tug aircraft wheeling north after releasing gliders
would run into heavy flak over the airfield. Turning south was almost
as bad; planes might risk collision with aircraft dropping the 82nd
Airborne near Nijmegen, eleven miles away. Urquhart was confronted
with a dilemma: he could insist that the R.a.f. place his troops in
proximity to the bridge, or he could choose drop zones much farther
away, outside Arnhem itself, with all the dangers that choice
entailed--delay, loss of surprise, possible German opposition. The
risks were multiplied because on D Day Urquhart would have only a part
of his division. "My problem was to get enough men down on the first
lift," Urquhart recalled, "not only to seize the main bridge in the
town itself, but also to guard and defend the drop zones and landing
areas for the succeeding lifts. To seize the main bridge on the first
day my strength was reduced to just one parachute brigade."

Faced with these restrictions, Urquhart appealed to Browning for extra
planes. It seemed to him, he told the Corps commander, "that the
Americans are getting all they need." Browning disagreed. The
allocation of aircraft, he assured Urquhart, was "entirely due to
priorities and not to any high-level American pressure." The entire
operation, he explained, had to be planned from south to north, "bottom
to top"; objectives in the southern and central sections of the
corridor must be "seized first to get the

ground forces through. Otherwise, the 1/ Airborne would be wiped
out."

In his command caravan on the Moor Park golf course near the clubhouse
that General Browning used as headquarters, Urquhart pored over his
maps and pondered the situation. Some open sectors existed north of
Arnhem in a national park, but these were too small and the terrain was
unsuitable. At best, these spots might accommodate a small parachute
force but no gliders. The only alternative was to land in some broad
expanses of open heaths and pasture land bordered by pine woods, 250
feet above sea level, lying west and northwest of Arnhem. The
heathlands were firm and flat, perfect for gliders and parachutists.
They were ideal in every way-- except one: the areas lay between six
and eight miles from the Arnhem bridge. Faced with the R.a.f.'s
continued opposition to a drop in the immediate vicinity of the bridge,
Urquhart reluctantly decided on the distant sites. "There was nothing
else to do," he recalled, "but to accept the risks and plan for them.
I was left with no choice." * * Colonel George S. Chatterton,
commanding the Glider Pilot Regiment, recalls that he wanted a coup de
main, "a force of five or six gliders to land near the bridge and take
it. I saw no reason why we could not do it, but apparently nobody else
saw the need for it, and I distinctly remember being called a bloody
murderer and assassin for suggesting it."

By September 12, Urquhart had his plan ready. Outlined on the map were
five landing and drop zones straddling the Arnhem-Amsterdam railroad in
the vicinity of Wolfheze, approximately four miles northwest of Arnhem.
Three sites lay north of Wolfheze and two south, the southern zones
together making up an irregular box-shaped tract more than a mile
square. All were at least six miles away from the bridge at Arnhem;
the farthest, northwest of Wolfheze, was eight.

On D Day two brigades would go in-- Brigadier Philip "Pip" Hicks's 1/
Airlanding Brigade, scheduled to hold the drop zones, and Brigadier
Gerald Lathbury's 1/ Parachute Brigade, which would make a dash for
Arnhem and its highway, railroad and pontoon bridges. Leading the way
would be a motorized reconnaissance squadron of jeeps and motorcycles.
Urquhart was

counting on Major C. F. H. "Freddie" Gough's highly specialized force
of some 275 men in four troops--the only unit of its kind in the
British army--to reach the highway bridge and hold it until the main
body of the brigade arrived.

The next day, D plus 1, Brigadier John "Shan" Hackett's 4th Parachute
Brigade was due to arrive, together with the remainder of the
Airlanding Brigade; and on the third day, Major General Stanislaw
Sosabowski's Polish 1/ Parachute Brigade was to be landed. Urquhart
had marked in a sixth drop zone for the Poles. Because it was
anticipated that, by D plus 2, the bridge would be captured and the
flak batteries knocked out, the Poles were to drop on the southern bank
of the Lower Rhine near the village of Elden about one mile south of
the Arnhem crossing.

Despite the risks he must accept, Urquhart felt confident. He believed
he had "a reasonable operation and a good plan." Casualties, he
thought, might be "somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 percent";
considering the intricate nature of the attack, he did not think the
cost was too high. In the early evening of September 12, he briefed
his commanders on the operation and, Urquhart remembers, "everybody
seemed quite content with the plan."

One commander, however, had grave misgivings. Major General Stanislaw
Sosabowski, the trim, fifty-two-year-old leader of the Polish 1/
Parachute Brigade, was quite sure that "we were in for a bitter
struggle." The former Polish War Academy professor had already stated
his position to Generals Urquhart and Browning when he first heard
about Operation Comet. At that time he had demanded that Urquhart give
him his orders in writing so that "I would not be held responsible for
the disaster." With Urquhart he had visited Browning and told him
"this mission cannot possibly succeed." Browning asked why. As
Sosabowski remembered, "I told him it would be suicide to attempt it
with the forces we had and Browning answered, "But, my dear Sosabowski,
the Red Devils and the gallant Poles can do anything!""

Now, one week later, as he listened to Urquhart, Sosabowski thought,
"the British are not only grossly underestimating German strength in
the Arnhem area, but they seem ignorant of the

significance Arnhem has for the Fatherland." Sosabowski believed that
to the Germans Arnhem represented "the gateway to Germany, and I did
not expect the Germans to leave it open." He did not believe that
"troops in the area were of very low caliber, with only a few battered
tanks sitting around." He was appalled when Urquhart told the
assembled brigade commanders that the 1/ Airborne was to be dropped "at
least six miles from the objective." To reach the bridge the main body
of troops would have "a five-hour march; so how could surprise be
achieved? Any fool of a German would immediately know our plans."

There was another part of the plan Sosabowski did not like. Heavy
equipment and ammunition for his brigade was to go in by glider on an
earlier lift. Thus, his stores would be on a northern landing zone
when his troops landed on the southern bank. What would happen if the
bridge was not taken by the time the Poles landed? As Urquhart spelled
out the plan, Sosabowski learned to his astonishment that, if the
bridge was still in German hands by that time, his Polish troops would
be expected to take it.

Despite Sosabowski's anxieties, at the September 12 briefing he
remained silent. "I remember Urquhart asking for questions and nobody
raised any," he recalled. "Everyone sat nonchalantly, legs crossed,
looking bored. I wanted to say something about this impossible plan,
but I just couldn't. I was unpopular as it was, and anyway who would
have listened?"

Later, when the entire airborne operation was reviewed for all
commanders at General Browning's headquarters, others had grave
misgivings about the British part of the plan but they too remained
silent. Brigadier General James M. Gavin, commander of the American
82nd Airborne, was so astonished when he heard of Urquhart's choice of
landing sites that he said to his operations chief, Lieutenant Colonel
John Norton, "My God, he can't mean it." Norton was equally appalled.
"He does," he said grimly, "but I wouldn't care to try it." In Gavin's
view, it was far better to take "10 percent initial casualties by
dropping either on or close to the bridge than to run the risk of
landing on distant drop zones." He was "surprised that General
Browning did not question Urqu-

hart's plan." Still, Gavin said nothing "for I assumed that the
British, with their extensive combat experience, knew exactly what they
were doing."

SS Sturmbannf@uhrer (major) Sepp Krafft did not intend to move again if
he could avoid it. In the past few weeks his understrength SS Panzer
Grenadier Training and Reserve Battalion had been ordered back and
forth across Holland. Now, after only five days, the unit was being
ordered out of the village of Oosterbeek--and not by a superior of
Krafft's, but by a Wehrmacht major.

Krafft protested vehemently. The main body of his three companies of
men was billeted in the village, with the rest in Arnhem, and another
1,000 SS recruits were due to arrive momentarily for training. The
Wehrmacht major was adamant. "I don't care about that," he told Krafft
bluntly, "you've got to get out." Krafft fought back. The ambitious
thirty-seven-year-old officer took orders only from his SS superiors.
"I refuse," he said. The Wehrmacht officer was not intimidated. "Let
me make things clear to you," he said. "You're moving out of
Oosterbeek because Model's headquarters is moving in."

Krafft quickly calmed down. He had no wish to run afoul of Field
Marshal Walter Model. Still, the order rankled. Krafft moved, but not
very far. He decided to bivouac his troops in the woods and farms
northwest of Oosterbeek, not far from the village of Wolfheze. The
spot he happened to choose was alongside the Wolfheze road, almost
between the zones marked on

maps in England for the men of the British 1/ Airborne Division to
land, and blocking the route into Arnhem itself.

Henri Knap, Arnhem's underground intelligence chief, felt safe in his
new role. To protect his wife and two daughters from complicity in his
activities, he had left home four months earlier and moved a few blocks
away. His headquarters were now in the offices of a general
practitioner, Dr. Leo C. Breebaart. The white-coated Knap was now the
doctor's "assistant," and certain "patients" were messengers and
couriers belonging to his intelligence network: forty men and women and
a few teen-agers.

Knap's was a time-consuming and frustrating job. He had to evaluate
the information he received and then pass it along by phone. Arnhem's
resistance chief, Pieter Kruyff, had given Knap three telephone
numbers, each with twelve to fifteen digits, and told him to commit
them to memory. Knap never knew where or to whom he was calling. His
instructions were to dial each number in turn until contact was made.
* * Knap has never learned who his contacts were except that his
reports were passed on to a top-secret unit known as the "Albrecht
Group." He knew the calls he made were long distance. At the time,
Dutch telephone numbers consisted of four digits. A brilliant
telephone technician named Nicolaas Tjalling de Bode devised a method
for underground members under which, by using certain telephone
numbers, they could bypass local switchboards and automatically call
all over Holland.

Gathering intelligence was even more complicated. Knap's requests were
passed down through the network chain, and he never knew what agent
procured the information. If a report seemed dubious, Knap
investigated on his own. At the moment he

was intrigued and puzzled by several reports that had reached him about
enemy activity in Oosterbeek.

A German officer wearing staff insignia, Major Horst Sm@ockel, had
visited a number of stores in Renkum, Oosterbeek and Arnhem and ordered
a variety of supplies to be delivered to Oosterbeek's Tafelberg Hotel.
What Knap found curious were the requisitions; among them were
hard-to-find foods and other specialty items which the Dutch population
rarely saw anymore, such as Genever gin.

Additionally, German signalmen had been busy laying a welter of
telephone cables to a number of hotels in the suburbs, including the
Tafelberg. The conclusion, Knap felt, was obvious: a high-ranking
headquarters was moving into Oosterbeek. But which one? Who was the
general? And had he arrived?

It was even more important for Knap to keep abreast of the enemy
strength in and around the Arnhem region. He knew there were other
intelligence men sending back information in each town and that he was
"only a small cog in a vast collection system." As a result, there was
probably "much duplication of effort." Nevertheless, everything was
important, for "what one cell might miss, we might pick up."

Two weeks before, as he later recalled, "there was almost no German
strength in the Arnhem region." Since then, the military picture had
changed dramatically. Now, Knap was alarmed at the German buildup.
From his network sources, over the previous seven days, Knap had
reported that "the remains of several divisions, including panzer
units, were in the process of reorganizing in and around Arnhem or were
moving into Germany." By now, more specific news had come. His
sources reported the presence of tanks north and northeast of Arnhem.
Knap believed that "parts of at least one or even two panzer divisions"
were in the area, but their identity and exact location were, so far,
not known.

Knap wanted details quickly. Urgently, he passed the word to his
network. He demanded more exact information on the panzer activity and
he wanted to know immediately the identity of the "new occupant" in the
Tafelberg Hotel.

Twenty-five-year-old Wouter van de Kraats had never heard of Henri
Knap. His contact in the underground was a man he knew only as
"Jansen" who lived somewhere in Arnhem. Jansen had a new assignment
for him--the Tafelberg Hotel. A high-ranking German officer had
arrived, he was told, and Van de Kraats was to see if any of the staff
cars outside "carried an identifying pennant or flag." If so, he was
to report the colors and symbols on the standard.

Van de Kraats had noticed an influx of German activity around the
hotel. German military police and sentries had moved into the area.
His problem was how to get through the sentries along the road--the
Pietersbergweg--running past the Tafelberg. He decided to bluff his
way through.

As he made for the hotel, he was immediately stopped by a sentry. "But
I must get through," Van de Kraats told the German. "I work at the
petrol station up the street." The German let him pass. Three other
sentries gave him only a cursory glance. Then, as Van de Kraats passed
the Tafelberg, he quickly looked at the entrance and the driveway.
None of the parked cars had any identifying markings, but near the
front door of the hotel stood a checkerboard black, red and white metal
pennant--the insignia of a German army group commander.

On the afternoon of Thursday, September 14, Henri Knap heard from his
network. Several sources reported large formations of panzer troops,
tanks and armored vehicles encamped in a semi-circle to the north of
Arnhem. There were units at Beekbergen, Epse and along the Ijssel
River. There was even a startling report of "20 to 30 Tiger tanks."
Exactly how many units were involved, he was unable to ascertain. He
was able to clearly identify only one, and that by a fluke. One of his
agents noted "strange mark-

ings--reverse F's with a ball at the foot of them"--on some tanks.
Checking through a special German manual, Knap was able to identify the
unit. He immediately called his telephone contact and reported the
presence of the 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen. From the agent's
report, Knap located its position as lying approximately to the north
between Arnhem and Apeldoorn and from there, eastward to Zutphen.

Shortly afterward he received word about the Tafelberg Hotel. He
passed this report on, too. The significant black, red and white
checkerboard pennant told its own story. There was only one German
army group commander in this part of the western front. Although Knap
reported the news as hearsay, it seemed to him the officer had to be
Field Marshal Walter Model.

Twenty-five miles east of Oosterbeek at his II SS Panzer Corps
headquarters in a small castle on the outskirts of Doetinchem, General
Wilhelm Bittrich held a meeting with his two remaining division
commanders. Bittrich was in a bad mood, barely able to contain his
temper. The outlook for his battered panzer corps was now far worse
than it had been a week earlier. Impatiently Bittrich had awaited
replacements in men, armor and equipment. None had arrived. On the
contrary, his force had been whittled down even more. He had been
ordered to send two combat groups to the front. One was with the
German Seventh Army trying to hold the Americans near Aachen; the other
was dispatched to bolster General Kurt Student's First Parachute Army
after British tanks successfully breached the Albert Canal line,

crossed the Meuse-Escaut Canal and grabbed a bridgehead at Neerpelt
almost on the Dutch border. Now, at a time when the British were
massing to renew their offensive--an attack that the intelligence chief
at Army Group B called "imminent"--Bittrich had received through Field
Marshal Model a "crazy directive from the fools in Berlin." One of his
shattered divisions was to be cannibalized and pulled back into
Germany.

A once-ardent Nazi, Bittrich denounced the order acridly. He "was sick
and tired of Berlin's orders and the sycophants around Hitler who were
indulging in all kinds of gimmickry." Courageous and able, Bittrich
had spent most of his adult life in uniform. In World War I, he had
served as a lieutenant in the German air force and had been twice
wounded. Later, for a few years, he worked in a stockbroker's office.
Then, rejoining the armed forces, Bittrich became a member of a secret
German airforce team and for eight years taught flying to the Russians.
When Hitler came to power, Bittrich joined the newly formed Luftwaffe
but in the mid-thirties he switched to the Waffen SS, where promotion
was faster. * * As a suspected war criminal, Bittrich spent eight
years in prison after World War II; on June 22, 1953, he was found
innocent and released. Waffen SS commanders are difficult to locate
and interview, but Bittrich and his officers were extremely helpful to
me in setting the record straight on many hitherto unknown events in
the Arnhem battle. Bittrich wanted me to clarify one minor matter
relating to his personal life. In various British accounts "I have
been described as a musician who hoped to be a conductor," he told me.
"But the authors have confused me with my brother, Dr. Gerhard
Bittrich, an extremely talented pianist and conductor."

In Normandy, Bittrich's faith in Hitler's leadership began to waver.
He sided with Field Marshal Rommel against Hitler's "insane
fight-to-the-last-man" philosophy. Once he confided to Rommel that "we
are being so badly led from above that I can no longer carry out
senseless orders. I have never been a robot and don't intend to become
one." After the July 20 plot, when he learned that his former
commander Colonel General Eric Hoepner, as a conspirator, had been
condemned to death by hanging, Bittrich raged to his staff that "this
is the blackest day for the German army." Bittrich's outspoken
criticism of Hitler's military leadership soon reached Berlin. As
Bittrich later recalled, "my

remarks were reported to the chief of the SS, Reichsf@uhrer Heinrich
Himmler, and the name Bittrich was no longer mentioned around Hitler's
headquarters." Only the near-collapse of the German front in the west,
a situation demanding Bittrich's kind of expertise, and the attitude of
sympathetic commanders had saved him from being recalled. Even so,
Himmler was still "eager for me to return to Germany for a little
talk." Bittrich had no illusions about Himmler's invitation. Nor had
Model; he was determined to keep Bittrich in the west and flatly
refused to entertain Himmler's repeated requests to send Bittrich
home.

Now the outraged Bittrich outlined Berlin's latest plan to the
commanders of his divisions--SS Brigadef@uhrer (brigadier General)
Heinz Harmel of the 10th Frundsberg Division and SS
Obersturmbannf@uhrer (lieutenant Colonel) Walter Harzer of the 9th
Hohenstaufen Division. Bittrich told Harzer--who had already learned
something about the plan from Model's chief of staff, Lieutenant
General Hans Krebs--that his 9th Hohenstaufen Division was to entrain
immediately for Germany, where it would be located near Siegen,
northeast of Koblenz. Harmel's 10th Division was to remain in Holland.
It would be refitted and brought up to strength in its present
location east and southeast of Arnhem, ready to be committed again.

The thirty-eight-year-old Harmel, whose bluff heartiness had earned him
the affectionate nickname of "der alte Frundsberg" from his men, was
not pleased with the decision. It seemed to him that "Bittrich was, as
usual, showing preference for the Hohenstaufen Division, perhaps
because it had been his own before he became corps commander and
perhaps, too, because Harzer had been his chief of staff." Although he
did not think "Bittrich was consciously unfair, it always seemed to
work out that the Hohenstaufen got the cushy jobs."

His younger counterpart, thirty-two-year-old Walter Harzer, was elated
at the news, even though he thought "the likelihood of getting Berlin
leave seemed doubtful." Ideally, after refitting he expected to have a
"brand-new Hohenstaufen Division." Privately, too, the tough Harzer,
his face marked by a saber scar,

had high hopes now of achieving his ambition: to be promoted to the
rank befitting an SS division commander--brigadier general. Still, as
Bittrich outlined the entire plan, one segment was not to Harzer's
liking.

Although badly depleted, his division was still stronger than Harmel's.
Instead of the usual 9,000 men, the Hohenstaufen had barely 6,000, the
Frundsberg about 3,500. Harzer had close to twenty Mark Very Panther
tanks, but not all were serviceable. He did, however, have a
considerable number of armored vehicles: self-propelled guns, armored
cars and forty armored personnel carriers, all with heavy machine guns,
some mounted with artillery pieces. Harmel's Frundsberg Division had
almost no tanks and was desperately short of all kinds of armored
vehicles. Both divisions still had formidable artillery, mortar and
antiaircraft units. To build up the Frundsberg Division, which would
remain behind, Bittrich said, Harzer was to transfer as much of his
transportation and equipment as he could to Harmel. Harzer was
skeptical. "In my heart," Harzer later recalled, "I knew damn well
that if I gave over my few tanks or the armored personnel carriers to
Harmel, they'd never be replaced." Harzer did not protest the
decision, but he had no intention of giving up all his vehicles.

Harzer had long ago learned to husband his division's resources. He
had more vehicles than even Bittrich realized--including American jeeps
he had captured during the long retreat from France. He decided to
ignore the order by "some paper maneuvering." By removing caterpillar
tracks, wheels or guns from his vehicles, he could make them
temporarily unserviceable until he reached Germany. In the meantime
they would be listed on his armored strength returns as disabled.

Even with the extra men and vehicles from Harzer's cannibalized
division, Bittrich continued, the Frundsberg would still be
understrength. There was only one way to stress the urgency of the
situation to Berlin: by presenting the facts directly to SS operational
headquarters. Maybe then, replacements and reinforcements would be
forthcoming. But Bittrich had no intention of visiting Berlin; Harmel
was made the emissary, to his surprise.

"I don't know why he chose me rather than Harzer," Harmel remembers.
"But we urgently needed men and armor, and perhaps Bittrich thought a
general might carry more weight. The whole matter was to be kept
secret from Field Marshal Model. So, as we were not expecting any
trouble in the Arnhem area, it was decided that I would leave for
Berlin on the evening of September 16."

The exchange of equipment between Harzer and Harmel and the move of the
cannibalized Hohenstaufen Division to Germany, Bittrich ordered, was to
begin immediately. While the operation was in process, he added, Field
Marshal Model wanted small mobile attack groups to be readied as
Alarmeinheiten ("alarm units") which could be committed in case of
emergency. As a result, Harzer privately decided that his "best units
would be entrained last." Bittrich expected the entire equipment
transfer and move completed by September 22. Because six trains a day
left for Germany, Harzer thought the task could be completed much
earlier. He believed his last and best units could leave for the
Fatherland in just three more days--probably on the afternoon of
September 17.

A demoralizing rumor was making the rounds. By September 14, several
senior German officers in Holland were saying that an airborne drop
would take place.

The talk originated from a conversation between Hitler's operations
chief, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, and the Commander in Chief, West,
Field Marshal von Rundstedt. Jodl was concerned that the Allies might
invade Holland from the sea. If Eisenhower followed his usual tactics,
Jodl said, airborne troops would be dropped as a prelude to the
seaborne attack. Von Rundstedt, though skeptical of the suggestion
(he, by contrast, was convinced that paratroopers would be dropped in
conjunction with an attack on the Ruhr), passed the information on to
Army Group B's commander, Field Marshal Model. Model's view was the
same

as Von Rundstedt's. Nevertheless, he could not ignore Jodl's warning.
He ordered the German armed forces commander in Holland, the jittery
Luftwaffe general, Friedrich Christiansen, to dispatch units of his
meager grab bag of army, navy, Luftwaffe and Dutch Waffen SS personnel
to the coast.

Since Jodl's call on September 11, the scare had traveled down the
various echelons of command, particularly through Luftwaffe channels.
Although the invasion had so far failed to materialize, the fear of an
airborne drop was still mounting. Everyone was speculating on possible
sites. From their maps, some Luftwaffe commanders saw the large open
areas between the north coast and Arnhem as possible landing zones.
Others, nervously awaiting the renewal of the British offensive into
Holland from the bridgehead over the Meuse-Escaut Canal at Neerpelt,
wondered if paratroopers might be used in conjunction with that attack
and dropped into the area of Nijmegen.

On September 13, Luftwaffe Colonel General Otto Dessloch, commander of
the 3rd Air Fleet, heard about Berlin's fears at Von Rundstedt's
headquarters in Koblenz. Dessloch was so concerned that he telephoned
Field Marshal Model the following day. Model, he recalls, thought
Berlin's invasion scare was "nonsense." The Field Marshal was so
unconcerned "that he invited me to dinner at his new headquarters in
the Tafelberg Hotel in Oosterbeek." Dessloch refused. "I have no
intention of being made a prisoner," he told Model. Just before he
hung up, Dessloch added: "If I were you, I would get out of that area."
Model, Dessloch remembers, merely laughed.

At Deelen airfield north of Arnhem word of a possible airborne attack
reached Luftwaffe fighter commander Major General Walter Grabmann. He
drove to Oosterbeek for a conference with Model's chief of staff,
Lieutenant General Hans Krebs. When Grabmann expressed the Luftwaffe's
fears, Krebs said, "For God's sake, don't talk about such things.
Anyway, where would they land?" Grabmann went to a map and, pointing
to areas west of Arnhem, said, "Anywhere here. The heath is perfect
for paratroopers." Krebs, Grabmann later recalled, "laughed and
warned

me that if I continued to talk this way, I'd make myself look
ridiculous."

Holland's notorious police chief, SS Lieutenant General Hanns Albin
Rauter, heard the rumor too, possibly from his superior General
Christiansen. Rauter was convinced that anything was possible,
including an airborne attack. Rauter, chief architect of Nazi terror
in the Netherlands, expected the Dutch underground to attack and the
population to rise at any moment. He was determined to stamp out any
kind of insurrection by the simple expedient of executing three Dutch
nationals for each Nazi killed. Rauter had declared an "emergency"
immediately after the German retreat and the stampede of Dutch Nazis to
Germany two weeks before. His police had taken bitter revenge against
anyone even remotely involved with the Dutch resistance. Men and women
were arrested, shot or sent off inffconcentration camps. Ordinary
citizens fared little better. All travel between provinces was
forbidden. More restrictive rules were imposed. Anyone found on the
streets during curfew risked being fired on without warning. All over
southern Holland, in anticipation of the British offensive, the Dutch
were pressed into service as laborers digging trenches for the
Wehrmacht. In Nijmegen, Rauter filled his workforce quota by
threatening to throw entire families inffconcentration camps.
Gatherings of any kind were forbidden. "Where more than five persons
are seen together," one of Rauter's posters warned, "they will be fired
on by the Wehrmacht, SS or police troops."

Now, with the British attack from the south imminent and Berlin's
warning of a possible air and sea attack in the north, Rauter's world
was beginning to come apart. He was terrified. * * In the safety of
his prison cell after the war, Rauter admitted to Dutch interrogators
that "at the time I was very nervous. ... I had to paralyze the
resistance." Rauter was found guilty by a Dutch court on January 12,
1949, of a wide range of offenses, including "persecution of the Jews,
deportation of inhabitants for slave labor, pillage, confiscation of
property, illegal arrests, detentions ... and the killings of innocent
civilians as reprisals for offenses ... against the occupying
authorities." He was executed on March 25, 1949.

Learning that Model was in Holland, Rauter decided to seek reassurance
and set out for the Tafelberg Hotel. On the evening of September 14,
Rauter met with Model and his chief of staff, General Krebs. He was
"convinced," Rauter told them, "that the Allies would now use airborne
forces in southern Holland." He felt that it was the right
psychological moment. Model and Krebs disagreed. Elite airborne
formations, Model said, were too "precious, their training too costly"
for indiscriminate use. The Field Marshal did indeed expect Montgomery
to attack into Holland from Neerpelt, but the situation was not
critical enough to justify the use of airborne troops. Also, since
assault forces would be separated by three broad rivers to the south,
he did not think that a British attack toward Arnhem was possible.
Both Nijmegen and Arnhem were too far from the British forces.
Besides, Model continued, Montgomery was "tactically a very cautious
man. He would never use airborne forces in a reckless adventure."

By the time the prisoner reached Major Friedrich Kieswetter's
headquarters in the village of Driebergen, west of Oosterbeek, on
September 15, the deputy chief of Wehrmacht counterintelligence in
Holland knew a great deal about him. There was an ample file on
slow-witted, twenty-eight-year-old Christiaan Antonius Lindemans,
better known, because of his huge size (6ft 3inch, 260 lbs.), as "King
Kong." Lindemans had been captured by a patrol near the Dutch-Belgian
border, in the no man's land between the British and German lines. At
first, because of his British battle dress, Lindemans was taken for a
soldier but, at the battalion command post near Valkenswaard, to the
amazement of his interrogators, he demanded to see Lieutenant Colonel
Hermann Giskes--German spy chief in Holland and Kieswetter's superior.
After a series of phone calls, Lindemans' captors were

even more astonished to receive orders to drive the prisoner
immediately to Driebergen. Lindemans alone displayed no surprise.
Some of his compatriots thought him to be a stanch member of the Dutch
underground; but the Germans knew him in another capacity--as a spy.
King Kong was a double agent.

Lindemans had turned traitor in 1943. At that time he offered to work
for Giskes in return for the release of his current mistress and
younger brother, Henk, arrested by the Gestapo as a member of the
underground and said to be awaiting execution. Giskes had readily
agreed; and ever since, Lindemans had served the Germans well. His
perfidy had resulted in the penetration of many underground cells and
the arrest and execution of numerous Dutch and Belgian patriots.
Although he was crude and boa/l, given to wild, drunken excesses and
possessed of an insatiable appetite for women, Lindemans had so far
miraculously escaped exposure. However, many resistance leaders
considered him a dangerous risk, unlike certain Allied officers in
Brussels who were so impressed by King Kong that Lindemans now worked
for a British intelligence unit under the command of a Canadian
captain.

In Giskes' absence, Kieswetter dealt with Lindemans for the first time.
He found the towering braggart, who introduced himself to everyone in
the office as the "great King Kong," disgusting. Lindemans told the
major of his latest mission. The Canadian intelligence officer had
sent him to warn underground leaders in Eindhoven that downed Allied
pilots were no longer to be sent through the "escape line" into
Belgium. Because the British were due to break out from the Neerpelt
bridgehead toward Eindhoven, the pilots were to be kept hidden.
Lindemans, who had spent five days coming through the lines, was able
to give Kieswetter some details on the British buildup. The attack, he
said flatly, would take place on September 17.

The imminence of the British move was hardly news. Kieswetter, like
everyone else, had been expecting it momentarily. Lindemans also
informed Kieswetter of another development: coincidental with the
British attack, he reported, a paratroop

drop was planned beyond Eindhoven to help capture the town. * The
revelation made no sense to Kieswetter. Why use paratroopers when the
British army could easily reach Eindhoven by itself? Perhaps because
Lindemans' information seemed unrealistic or more likely because of his
antipathy toward King Kong, Kieswetter told Lindemans to continue on
with his mission and then return to the British lines. Kieswetter took
no immediate action. He thought so little of Lindemans' information
that he did not pass it on directly to Wehrmacht headquarters. He sent
it, instead, through the Sicherheitsdienst (Ss security and
intelligence service). He also dictated a brief memorandum of his
conversation with Lindemans for Giskes, at the moment away on another
assignment. Giskes, who had always considered King Kong reliable,
would not receive it until the afternoon of September 17. * After the
war, some British newspapers charged that it was because Lindemans
pinpointed Arnhem as the main airborne objective that the panzer
divisions were waiting. Obviously this is not so. Bittrich's corps
reached its positions before Eisenhower and Montgomery met on September
10 and decided on Market-Garden. Neither could Lindemans have known
anything about the Arnhem attack or the massive dimensions of the
operation. Again, Allied decisions on dates, placement of drop zones,
etc. were made long after Lindemans left Brussels to cross the German
lines. A second often-repeated story is that Lindemans was taken to
Colonel General Kurt Student's headquarters at Vught for questioning,
and it has been suggested that the airborne expert correctly evaluated
the report and gave the alert. Student flatly denies this allegation.
"It is a large fat lie," he told me. "I never met Lindemans. Indeed,
I first heard of the whole affair in a prison camp after the war."
Student adds, "The truth is, nobody in the German command knew anything
about the attack until it happened." Shortly after Market-Garden,
suspicion fell on Lindemans and he was arrested by the Dutch. King
Kong, the great Lothario, lived up to his reputation to the very end.
In July, 1946, forty-eight hours before his trial, Lindemans, in a
prison hospital, was found unconscious with a prison nurse nearby.
Both of them, in a bizarre "love pact," had taken overdoses of sleeping
pills. Lindemans died, the girl survived.

Operation Market-Garden was now less than forty-eight hours away. In
his office Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's chief
of staff, listened to SHAEF'S intelligence chief, British Major General
Kenneth W. Strong, disclose his latest news with growing alarm. Beyond
doubt, Strong said, there was German armor in the Market-Garden area.

For days, Strong and his staff had been sifting and assessing every
intelligence report in an effort to determine the whereabouts of the
9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions. Since the first week in September
there had been no contact with the units. Both were badly cut up, but
it was considered unlikely that they had been completely destroyed.
One theory held that the units might have been ordered back into
Germany. Now Dutch underground messages told a different story. The
lost divisions had been spotted.

The 9th and, presumably, the 10th SS Panzer divisions were in Holland,
Strong reported to Smith, "in all probability to be refitted with
tanks." Exactly what remained of the units or their fighting
capability no one could say, but there was no longer any doubt about
their location, Strong reported. They were definitely in the vicinity
of Arnhem.

Deeply concerned about Market-Garden and, in his own words, "alarmed
over the possibility of failure," Smith immediately conferred with the
Supreme Commander. The British 1/ Airborne Division, due to land at
Arnhem, "could not hold out against two armored divisions," Smith told
Eisenhower. To be sure, there was

a question--a big question--about the strength of the units, but to be
on the safe side Smith thought that Market-Garden should be reinforced.
He believed two airborne divisions would be required in the Arnhem
area. (presumably, Smith had in mind as the additional unit the
veteran British 6th Airborne Division, commanded by Major General
Richard Gale, which had been used successfully during the Normandy
invasion, but was not included in Market-Garden.) Otherwise, Smith told
Eisenhower, the plan must be revised. "My feeling," he later said,
"was that if we could not drop the equivalent of another division in
the area, then we should shift one of the American airborne divisions,
which were to form the "carpet" further north, to reinforce the
British."

Eisenhower considered the problem and its risks. On the basis of this
intelligence report and almost on the eve of the attack, he was being
urged to override Monty's plan--one that Eisenhower himself had
approved. It meant challenging Montgomery's generalship and upsetting
an already delicate command situation. As Supreme Commander, he had
another option open: Market-Garden could be canceled; but the only
grounds for such a decision would be this single piece of intelligence.
Eisenhower had obviously to assume that Montgomery was the best judge
of enemy strength before him and that he would plan accordingly. As
Eisenhower explained to Smith, "I cannot tell Monty how to dispose of
his troops," nor could he "call off the operation, since I have already
given Monty the green light." If changes were to be made, Montgomery
would have to make them. Still, Eisenhower was prepared to let Smith
"fly to 21/ Army Group headquarters and argue it out with
Montgomery."

Bedell Smith set out immediately for Brussels. He found Montgomery
confident and enthusiastic. Smith explained his fears about the panzer
units in the Arnhem area and strongly suggested that the plan might
need revision. Montgomery "ridiculed the idea. Monty felt the
greatest opposition would come more from terrain difficulties than from
the Germans. All would go well, he kept repeating, if we at SHAEF
would help him surmount his

logistical difficulties. He was not worried about the German armor.
He thought Market-Garden would go all right as set." The conference
was fruitless. "At least I tried to stop him," Smith said, "but I got
nowhere. Montgomery simply waved my objections airily aside." * * I
have based this entire section on information supplied to me by General
S. L. A. Marshall, Chief Historian for the European Theatre of
Operations during World War II, who kindly allowed me to see his
various monographs on Market-Garden and also his 1975 interview with
General Bedell Smith on the meeting with Eisenhower and later
Montgomery.

Even as Montgomery and Smith conferred, across the Channel startling
evidence reached British I Airborne Corps headquarters. Earlier in the
day, fighters of the R.a.f.'s specially equipped photo-reconnaissance
squadron returning from The Hague had made a low-level sweep over the
Arnhem area. Now, in his office, intelligence officer Major Brian
Urquhart took up a magnifying glass and examined five oblique-angle
pictures--an "end of the run" strip from one of the fighters. Hundreds
of aerial photographs of the Market-Garden area had been taken and
evaluated in the previous seventy-two hours, but only these five shots
showed what Urquhart had long feared--the unmistakable presence of
German armor. "It was the straw that broke the camel's back," Urquhart
later recalled. "There, in the photos, I could clearly see tanks--if
not on the very Arnhem landing and drop zones, then certainly close to
them."

Major Urquhart rushed to General Browning's office with the
photographic confirmation. Browning saw him immediately. Placing the
pictures on the desk before Browning, Urquhart said, "Take a look at
these." The General studied them one by one. Although Urquhart no
longer remembers the exact wording, to the best of his recollection,
Browning said, "I wouldn't trouble myself about these if I were you."
Then, referring to the tanks in the photos, he continued, "They're
probably not serviceable at any rate." Urquhart was stunned.
Helplessly he pointed out that the armor, "whether serviceable or not,
were still tanks and they

had guns." Looking back, Urquhart feels that "perhaps because of
information I knew nothing about, General Browning was not prepared to
accept my evaluation of the photos. My feeling remained the same--that
everyone was so gung-ho to go that nothing could stop them."

Urquhart was unaware that some members of Browning's staff considered
the young intelligence officer almost too zealous. The show was about
to begin, and most officers were anxious and eager to get on with it.
Urquhart's pessimistic warnings irritated them. As one senior staff
officer put it, "His views were colored by nervous exhaustion. He was
inclined to be a bit hysterical, no doubt brought on by overwork."

Shortly after his meeting with Browning, Urquhart was visited by the
corps medical officer. "I was told," Urquhart recalls, "that I was
exhausted--who wasn't?--and that perhaps I should take a rest and go on
leave. I was out. I had become such a pain around headquarters that
on the very eve of the attack I was being removed from the scene. I
was told to go home. There was nothing I could say. Although I
disagreed with the plan and feared the worst, still, this was going to
be the big show and, curiously, I did not want to be left behind."

By noon on Saturday, September 16, the German proclamation was
plastered on bulletin boards all over Arnhem.

By order of the Security Police, the following is announced:

During the night an attack with explosives was made on the railroad
viaduct at Schaapsdrift.

The population is called upon to cooperate in tracing the culprits of
this attack.

If they have not been found before 12 o'clock noon on Sunday, September
17, 1944, a number of hostages will be shot.

I appeal to the cooperation of all of you in order that needless
victims be spared.

The acting Burgomaster, LIERA

In a cellar, leading members of the Arnhem underground met in an
emergency meeting. The sabotage of the railroad viaduct had been badly
botched. Henri Knap, the Arnhem intelligence chief, had not been happy
about the mission from its inception. He felt that, "at best, we are
all rank amateurs when it comes to sabotage." In his view, "it is far
better to concentrate on feeding intelligence to the Allies and to
leave demolition jobs to men who know what they are doing." The chief
of the Arnhem underground, thirty-eight-year-old Pieter Kruyff, asked
for the others' opinions. Nicolaas Tjalling de Bode voted that the
members give themselves up. Knap remembers thinking "this was a very
steep price to pay--the lives of the hostages, innocent people--for a
small hole in a bridge." Gijsbert Jan Numan was conscience-stricken.
He had been involved along with Harry Montfroy, Albert Deuss, Toon van
Daalen and others in procuring the materials for the explosives and in
planning the sabotage, and no one wanted innocent men to suffer. Yet
what was to be done? Kruyff heard everyone out, then he made his
decision. "The organization must stay intact even though innocent
people may be shot," he decreed. Looking around at the assembled
leaders, as Nicolaas de Bode remembers, Kruyff told them, "No one will
give himself up to the Germans. That's my order." Henri Knap had a
feeling of dread. He knew that if the Germans followed their usual
procedure, ten or twelve leading citizens-- doctors, lawyers and
teachers among them--would be publicly executed in an Arnhem square at
noon on Sunday.

All down the Allied line of command the evaluation of intelligence on
the panzers in the Arnhem area was magnificently bungled. SHAEF'S
Intelligence Summary No. 26 issued on September 16, the eve of
Market-Garden--containing the ominous warning that had caused General
Bedell Smith's alarm--was disregarded. In part, it read, "9th SS
Panzer Division, and presumably the 10th, has been reported withdrawing
to the Arnhem area in Holland; there, they will probably collect new
tanks from a depot reported in the area of Cleves."

The information, already discredited by Montgomery at his meeting with
Smith, was now discounted by General Dempsey's British Second Army
headquarters--the same headquarters that had originally noted the
presence in Holland of "battered panzer formations" on September 10.
In the most serious blunder of all, Dempsey's intelligence staff, on
September 14, described the Germans in the Market-Garden area as "weak,
demoralized and likely to collapse entirely if confronted with a large
airborne attack." Now, in a complete reversal of their original
position, they dismissed the presence of the panzers, because Dempsey's
staff officers were unable to spot enemy armor on any reconnaissance
photos.

At First Allied Airborne Army headquarters, General Brereton's chief
intelligence officer, British Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Tasker, was
not prepared to accept SHAEF'S report either. Reviewing all the
information available, he decided there was no direct evidence that the
Arnhem area contained "much

more than the considerable flak defenses already known to exist."

Everyone, it seemed, accepted the optimistic outlook of Montgomery's
headquarters. As the British I Airborne Corps's chief of staff,
Brigadier Gordon Walch, remembers, "21/ Army Group headquarters was the
principal source of our intelligence, and we took what they gave us to
be true." General Urquhart, commander of the British 1/ Airborne
Division, put it another way. "Nothing," he said, "was allowed to mar
the optimism prevailing across the Channel."

Yet, besides SHAEF'S report on the "missing" panzers, there was other
evidence of German buildup, again almost cursorily noted. At the
front, ahead of General Horrocks' XXX Corps Garden forces, it was plain
that an increasing number of German units were moving into the line.
Now the strategic error at Antwerp ten days before was beginning to
build and threaten the grand design of Operation Market-Garden. The
German troops filling out General Student's front were none other than
units of the splintered divisions that had escaped across the mouth of
the Schelde--the battered men of Von Zangen's Fifteenth Army, the army
the Allies had practically written off. Intelligence officers did note
that, though the Germans had increased in number, the new units in the
line were "believed to be in no fit state to resist any determined
advance." Any British Tommy along the Belgium-Dutch frontier could
have told them otherwise. * * British Major General Hubert Essame
(retired) in his excellent book The Battle for Germany (people. 13),
writes: "In misappreciation of the actual situation at the end of
August and the first half of September, Allied intelligence staffs sank
to a level only reached by Brigadier John Charteris, Haig's Chief
Intelligence Officer at the time of the Passchendaele Battles in 1917."
At that time the wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George alleged
that Charteris "selected only those figures and facts which suited his
fancy and then issued hopeful reports accordingly." At various times
during the 1917 Flanders campaign Charteris reported the enemy as
"cracking," "mangled," "with few reserves," and even "on the run." In
the dreadful battles that ensued around Passchendaele between July 31
and November 12, casualties, according to the official British history,
totaled a staggering 244,897.

The cobblestone streets of the dingy mining town of Leopoldsburg in
northern Belgium, barely ten miles from the front, were

choked with jeeps and scout cars. All roads seemed to lead to a cinema
opposite the railway station--and never before had the nondescript
theater held such an audience. Officers of Lieutenant General
Horrocks' XXX Corps--the Garden forces that would drive north through
Holland to link up with the paratroopers--crowded the street and milled
around the entrance as their credentials were inspected by red-capped
military police. It was a colorful, exuberant group and it reminded
Brigadier Hubert Essame, commanding officer of the 214th Brigade, 43rd
Wessex Infantry Division, of "an army assembly at a point-to-point race
or a demonstration on Salisbury Plain in time of peace." He was
fascinated by the colorful dress of the commanders. There was a
striking variety of headgear. No one had a steel helmet, but berets of
many colors bore the proud badges of famous regiments, among them the
Irish, Grenadier, Coldstream, Scotch, Welsh and Royal Horse Guards, the
Royal Army Service Corps and Royal Artillery. There was a regal
casualness about everyone's attire. Essame noted that most commanders
were dressed in "sniper's smocks, parachutists' jackets and jeep coats
over brightly colored slacks, corduroys, riding britches or even
jodhpurs." Instead of ties many sported ascots or "scarves of various
colors." * * In his history of The 43rd Wessex Division at War
(people. 115), Essame writes: "Sartorial disciplinarians of the
future" might remember "that when the morale of the British Army was as
high as at any time in its history, officers wore the clothing they
found most suitable to the conditions under which they had to live and
fight."

The renowned Lieutenant Colonel J.o.e. ("Joe") Vandeleur, the solidly
built, ruddy-faced, six-foot commander of the Irish Guards Armored
Group, personified the kind of devil-may-care elegance of the Guards'
officers. The forty-one-year-old Vandeleur was wearing his usual
combat garb: black beret, a multi-colored camouflaged parachutist's
jacket, and corduroy trousers above high rubber boots. Additionally,
Vandeleur wore, as always, a .45 Colt automatic strapped to his hip
and, tucked into his jacket, what had become a symbol for his tankers,
a flamboyant emerald-green scarf. The fastidious General "Boy"
Browning, back in England, would have winced. Even Horrocks had

once dryly admonished Vandeleur. "If the Germans ever get you, Joe,"
he said, "they'll think they've captured a peasant." But on this
September 16 even Horrocks lacked the usual elegance of the impeccably
dressed British staff officer. Instead of a shirt he wore a ribbed
polo sweater and, over his battle dress, a sleeveless leather jerkin
reminiscent of a British yeoman's dress.

As the popular Horrocks made his way down the aisle of the crowded
theater he was greeted on all sides. The meeting he had called had
sparked high excitement. Men were eager to get going again. From the
Seine to Antwerp, Horrocks' tanks had often averaged fifty miles in a
single day, but ever since the disastrous three-day halt on September 4
to "refit, refuel and rest," the going had been rough. With the
British momentum gone, the enemy had quickly recovered. In the two
vital weeks since, the British advance had been reduced to a crawl. It
had taken four days for the Guards Armored Division--led by Joe
Vandeleur's Irish Guards Group--to advance ten miles and capture the
vital bridge over the Meuse-Escaut Canal near Neerpelt, from which the
attack into Holland would begin the next day. Horrocks had no
illusions about the German opposition, but he was confident that his
forces could break through the enemy crust.

At precisely 11 A.m. Horrocks stepped onto the stage. All those
assembled knew that the British offensive was about to be renewed, but
so great was the security surrounding Montgomery's plan that only a few
general officers present knew the details. With D Day for Operation
Market-Garden barely twenty-four hours away, the Field Marshal's
commanders now learned of the attack for the first time.

Attached to the cinema screen was a huge map of Holland. Colored tape
snaked north along a single highway, crossing the great river obstacles
and passing through the towns of Valkenswaard, Eindhoven, Veghel, Uden,
Nijmegen and thence to Arnhem, a distance of some sixty-four miles.
From there the tape continued for another thirty-odd miles to the
Zuider Zee. Horrocks took a long pointer and began the briefing.
"This is a tale

you will tell your grandchildren," he told his audience. Then he
paused and, much to the delight of the assembled officers, added: "And
mightily bored they'll be."

In the audience, Lieutenant Colonel Curtis D. Renfro, liaison officer
from the 101/ Airborne Division and one of the few Americans present,
was impressed by the Corps commander's enthusiasm and confidence. He
talked for an hour, Curtis recorded, "with only an occasional reference
to notes."

Step by step Horrocks explained the complexities of Market-Garden. The
airborne army would go in first, he said. Its objectives: to capture
the bridges in front of XXX Corps. Horrocks would give the word for
the attack to begin. Depending on the weather, zero hour for the
ground forces was expected to be 2 P.m. At that moment 350 guns would
open fire and lay down a massive artillery barrage that would last
thirty-five minutes. Then, at 2:35 P.m., led by waves of rocket-firing
Typhoons, XXX Corps tanks would break out of their bridgehead and
"blast down the main road." The Guards Armored Division would have the
honor of leading the attack. They would be followed by the 43rd Wessex
and 50th Northumberland divisions, and then by the 8th Armored Brigade
and the Dutch Princess Irene Brigade.

There was to be "no pause, no stop," Horrocks emphasized. The Guards
Armored was "to keep going like hell" all the way to Arnhem. The
breakout from the bridgehead, Horrocks believed, would be "almost
immediate." He expected the first Guards tanks to be in Eindhoven
within two or three hours. If the enemy reacted fast enough to blow
all the bridges before the airborne troops could secure them, then the
43rd Wessex Infantry Division engineers, coming up behind, would rush
forward with men and bridging equipment. This massive engineering
operation, should it be required, Horrocks explained, could involve
9,000 engineers and some 2,277 vehicles already in the Leopoldsburg
area. The entire XXX Corps armored column was to be fed up the main
road with the vehicles two abreast, thirty-five vehicles per mile.
Traffic would be one way, and Horrocks expected "to pass 20,000
vehicles over the highway to Arnhem in sixty hours."

General Allan Adair, the forty-six-year-old commander of the famed
Guards Armored Division, listening to Horrocks, thought Market-Garden
was a bold plan, but he also believed "it might be tricky." He
expected the worst moment to be the breakout from the Meuse-Escaut
Canal bridgehead. Once through that, although he fully expected German
resistance, he thought the going would "not be difficult." Besides, he
had every faith in the unit that would lead off the attack-- Lieutenant
Colonel Joe Vandeleur's Irish Guards Group.

Joe Vandeleur, as he learned that his tanks would spearhead the
breakout, remembers thinking to himself, "Oh, Christ! Not us again."
Vandeleur was proud that his veteran unit had been chosen, yet he knew
his troops were tired and his units understrength. Since the breakout
from Normandy he had received very few replacements in either men or
tanks; furthermore, "they weren't allowing a hell of a lot of time for
planning." But then he thought, how much time do you really need to
plan for a straight bash through the German lines? Next to him, his
cousin, thirty-three-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Giles Vandeleur, who
commanded the 2nd Battalion under Joe, was "struck with horror at the
plan to blast through the German resistance on a one-tank front." To
him, it was not proper armored warfare. But he recalls "swallowing
whatever misgivings I had and succumbing to a strange, tense
excitement, like being at the pole at the start of a horse race."

To three men in the theater, the announcement produced deep personal
feelings. The senior officers of the Dutch Princess Irene Brigade had
led their men in battle all the way from Normandy. First they had
fought alongside the Canadians; then, after the fall of Brussels, they
were transferred to the British Second Army. Now they would be coming
home. Much as they looked forward to the liberation of Holland, the
commander, Colonel Albert "Steve" de Ruyter van Steveninck; his second
in command, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Pahud de Mortanges; and the
chief of staff, Major Jonkheer Jan Beelaerts van Blokland, had grave
misgivings about the manner in which it was to be accomplished.

Steveninck considered the entire plan risky. Mortanges' impression was
that the British were more offhand about what lay ahead than the facts
justified. As he put it, "It was made to seem quite elementary.
First, we'll take this bridge; then that one and hop this river. ...
The terrain ahead with its rivers, marshes, dikes and lowlands, was
extremely difficult--as the British well knew from our many
presentations." The thirty-three-year-old chief of staff, Beelaerts
van Blokland, could not help thinking of past military history. "We
seemed to be violating Napoleon's maxim about never fighting unless you
are at least 75 percent sure of success. Then, the other 25 percent
can be left to chance. The British were reversing the process; we were
leaving 75 percent to chance. We had only forty-eight hours to get to
Arnhem, and if the slightest thing went wrong--a bridge blown, stiffer
German resistance than anticipated-- we'd be off schedule." Blokland
had a private worry, too. His parents lived in the village of
Oosterbeek, just two and a half miles from the Arnhem bridge.

One of the few officers below the rank of brigade major who heard the
briefing was twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant John Gorman of the Irish
Guards. He was stimulated by the whole affair and thought Horrocks was
"at his finest." The Corps commander, Gorman later recalled, "called
into play all his wit and humor, interspersing the more dramatic or
technical points with humorous little asides. He really was quite a
showman." Gorman was particularly pleased with Operation Garden
because "the Guards were to lead out and obviously their role would be
tremendously dramatic."

When the meeting had ended and commanders headed out to brief their
troops, young Gorman felt his first "private doubts about the chances
of success." Lingering in front of a map, he remembers thinking that
Market-Garden was "a feasible operation--but only just feasible."
There were simply "too many bridges." Nor was he enthusiastic about
the terrain itself. He thought it was poor tank country and advancing
on "a one-tank front, we would be very vulnerable." But the promise of
support from rocket-firing Typhoons was reassuring. So was another

promise of sorts. Gorman remembered the day, months before, when he
had received the Military Cross for bravery from Montgomery himself. *
At the investiture, Monty had said, "If I were a betting man I should
say it would be an even bet that the war will be over by Christmas."
And Horrocks, Gorman recalls, had "told us that this attack could end
the war." The only alternative Gorman could find to "going north
seemed to be a long dreary winter camped on or near the Escaut Canal."
Monty's plan, he believed, "had just the right amount of dash and
daring to work. If there was a chance to win the war by Christmas,
then I was for pushing on. * Gorman won his Military Cross during the
fighting at Caen, Normandy. Leading a trio of Sherman tanks, he was
suddenly confronted by four German tanks, one a 60-ton Tiger. His men
dispatched the German armor and Gorman rammed the huge Tiger tank,
destroyed its gun and killed its crew as they tried to escape.

Now, in the flat, gray Belgian countryside with its coal fields and
slag heaps which reminded so many of Wales, the men who would lead the
way for General Dempsey's British Second Army heard of the plan and the
promise of Arnhem. Along side roads, in bivouac areas and in
encampments, soldiers gathered around their officers to learn the part
they would play in Operation Market-Garden. When Lieutenant Colonel
Giles Vandeleur told his officers that the Irish would be leading out,
twenty-nine-year-old Major Edward G. Tyler remembers that a "half moan"
went up from the assembled officers. "We figured," he recalls, "that
we deserved a bit of a break after taking the bridge over the Escaut
Canal, which we named "Joe's bridge" after Joe Vandeleur. But our
commanding officer told us that it was a great honor for us to be
chosen." Despite his desire for a reprieve, Tyler thought so too. "We
were used to one-tank fronts," he remembers, "and in this case we were
trusting to speed and support. No one seemed worried."

But Lieutenant Barry Quinan, who had just turned twenty-one, was
"filled with trepidation." He was going into action for the first time
with the lead Guards Armored tank squadron under Captain Mick O'Cock.
Quinan's infantry would travel on the backs of the tanks,
Russian-style. To him, "the number of rivers ahead seemed

ominous. We were not amphibious." Yet Quinan felt proud that his men
would be "leading the entire British Second Army."

Lieutenant Rupert Mahaffey, also twenty-one, vividly remembers being
told that "if the operation was a success the wives and children at
home would be relieved from the threat of the Germans' V-2 rockets."
Mahaffey's mother lived in London, which by that time was under intense
bombardment. Although he was excited at the prospect of the attack,
the single road leading all the way up to Arnhem was, he thought, "an
awfully long way to go."

Captain Roland S. Langton, twenty-three, just returned from five days
in a field hospital after receiving shrapnel wounds, learned that he
was no longer adjutant of the 2nd Irish Guards Battalion. Instead, he
was assigned as second in command of Captain Mick O'Cock's breakout
squadron. He was jubilant about the assignment. The breakout seemed
to Langton a straightforward thing. Garden could not be anything but a
success. It was "obvious to all that the Germans were disorganized and
shaken, lacking cohesion, and capable only of fighting in small
pockets."

Not everyone was so confident. As Lieutenant A. G. C. "Tony" Jones,
twenty-one, of the Royal Engineers, listened to the plan, he thought it
was "clearly going to be very difficult." The bridges were the key to
the entire operation and, as one officer remarked, "The drive of the
XXX Corps will be like threading seven needles with one piece of cotton
and we only have to miss one to be in trouble." To veteran Guardsman
Tim Smith, twenty-four, the attack was "just another battle." On this
day his greatest concern was the famed St. Leger race at Newmarket.
He had a tip that a horse called Tehran, to be ridden by the famous
jockey Gordon Richards, was "a sure thing." He placed every penny he
had on Tehran with a lance corporal at battalion headquarters. If
Market-Garden was the operation that would win the war, this was just
the day to win the St. Leger. To his amazement, Tehran won. He was
quite sure now that Market-Garden would succeed.

One man was "decidedly uncomfortable." Flight Lieutenant Donald Love,
twenty-eight, an R.a.f. fighter-reconnaissance

pilot, felt completely out of place among the officers of the Guards
Armored. He was part of the air liaison team which would call in the
rocket-firing Typhoon fighters from the ground when the breakout began.
His lightly armored vehicle (code-named "Winecup"), with its canvas
roof and its maze of communications equipment, would be up front close
to Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur's command car. Love felt naked and
defenseless: the only weapons the R.a.f. team possessed were revolvers.
As he listened to Vandeleur talking about "a rolling barrage that
would move forward at a speed of 200 yards per minute" and heard the
burly Irishman describe Love's little scout car as an "armored signal
tender for direct communication with pilots in the sky," Love's concern
mounted. "I got the distinct impression that I would be the one
responsible for calling in the "cab rank" of Typhoons overhead." The
thought was not reassuring. Love knew very little about the radio
setup, and he had never before acted as a ground-to-air tactical
officer. Then, to his acute relief, he learned that an expert,
Squadron Leader Max Sutherland, would join him the following day to
handle the communications for the initial breakout. Thereafter, Love
would be in charge. Love began to wonder whether he should have
volunteered in the first place. He had only taken the job "because I
thought it might be a nice change of pace."

A change of a different sort bothered the commander of the Irish
Guards. During the capture of the bridgehead over the Escaut Canal,
Joe Vandeleur had lost "a close and distinguished friend." His
broadcasting van, with its huge trumpetlike loudspeaker on the roof,
had been destroyed by a German shell. All through training back in
England and in the great advance from Normandy, Joe had used the van to
broadcast to his troops and after each session, being a lover of
classical music, he had always put on a record or two--selections that
didn't always please the Guardsmen. The van had been blown to pieces
and shards of the classical records--along with Vandeleur's favorite
popular tune--had showered down over the countryside. Joe was saddened
by his loss; not so, his Irish Guardsmen. They thought the drive to

Arnhem would be arduous enough without having to listen to Joe's
loudspeaker blaring out his current theme song, "Praise the Lord and
Pass the Ammunition."

Meanwhile, in England the paratroopers and glider-borne infantry of the
First Allied Airborne Army were even now in marshaling areas, ready for
the moment of takeoff. Over the previous forty-eight hours, using
maps, photographs and scale models, officers had briefed and rebriefed
their men. The preparations were immense and meticulous. At
twenty-four air bases (8 British, 16 American), vast fleets of
troop-carrying aircraft, tow planes and gliders were checked out,
fueled and loaded with equipment ranging from artillery to jeeps. Some
ninety miles north of London, Brigadier General James M. Gavin's
"All-American" 82nd Airborne Division was already shut off from the
outside world at a cluster of airfields around Grantham in
Lincolnshire. So were part of General Roy Urquhart's Red Devils, the
British 1/ Airborne Division, and Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski's
Polish 1/ Parachute Brigade. To the south around Newbury, roughly
eighty miles west of London, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor's
Screaming Eagles, the 101/ Airborne Division, were also "sealed in."
In the same area, and stretching as far down as Dorsetshire, was the
remainder of Urquhart's division. The majority of his units would not
move to the airfields until the morning of the seventeenth, but in
hamlets, villages and bivouac areas close to the departure points, they
too made ready. Everywhere now, the airborne forces of Market-Garden
waited out the time until takeoff and the historic invasion of Holland
from the sky.

Some men felt more concern at being sealed in than about the mission
itself. At an airfield near the village of Ramsbury, the security
precautions made Corporal Hansford Vest, of the 101/ Division's 502nd
Regiment, distinctly uneasy. Aircraft and gliders "were parked for
miles all over the countryside and there were guards everywhere." He
noted that the airfield was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence with
"British guards on the outside and our own guards on the inside." Vest
had the "feeling that our

freedom was gone." Private James Allardyce of the 508th Regiment, in
his crowded tent city, tried to ignore the barbed wire and guards. He
checked and rechecked his equipment "until it was almost worn out."
Allardyce could not shake off the feeling that "we were like condemned
men waiting to be led off."

Other men worried principally about their chances of going on the
mission. So many previous operations had been canceled that one new
recruit, nineteen-year-old Private Melvin Isenekev, of the 506th
Regiment (he had arrived from the States on June 6, the day the 101/
had jumped into Normandy), still didn't believe they would go when they
reached the marshaling area. Isenekev felt he had trained "long and
hard for this and I didn't want to be held back." Yet he almost was.
Trying to light a makeshift oil burner used for heating water, he threw
a lighted match into an oil drum. When nothing happened, Isenekev "put
my head over it to look in and it exploded." Temporarily blinded, he
instantly thought, "Now I've done it. They won't let me go." However
within a few minutes his eyes stopped burning and he could see again.
But he believes he was the only member of the 101/ jumping into Holland
with no eyebrows.

First Sergeant Daniel Zapalski, twenty-four, of the 502nd, "sweated out
the jump; hoping the chute was packed right; hoping the field was soft;
and hoping I didn't land in a tree." He was eager to go. Although he
had not fully recovered from a Normandy leg wound, Zapalski believed
his injury "was not serious enough to keep me from doing my normal
duty." His battalion commander, the popular Lieutenant Colonel Robert
G. Cole, disagreed. He had turned down Zapalski's pleas. Undeterred,
Zapalski had bypassed Cole and obtained a written release certifying
his combat readiness from the regimental surgeon. Though Zapalski and
Cole had fought together in Normandy, the sergeant now got a "typical
Cole chewing out. He called me "a fatheaded Polack, impractical,
burdensome and unreasonable."" But he let Zapalski go.

Captain Raymond S. Hall, the 502nd's regimental chaplain, had a
somewhat similar problem. He was "most anxious to return

to action and to be with my men." But he too had been wounded in
Normandy. Now the doctors would not let him jump. He was finally told
that he could go in by glider. The chaplain was horrified. A veteran
paratrooper, he considered gliders distinctly unsafe.

Fear of death or of failure to perform well disturbed others. Captain
LeGrand Johnson, twenty-two-year-old company commander, remembering
"the horrors and narrow escapes" during the 101/'s night airborne
attack preceding the Normandy invasion, was fatalistically "resigned."
He was convinced that he would not return from this mission. Still,
the young officer "fully intended to raise as much hell as I could."
Johnson was not sure he liked the idea of a daylight drop. It might
produce more casualties. On the other hand, this time "we would be
able to see the enemy." To hide his nervousness, Johnson made bets
with his fellow troopers on who would get the first Dutch beer. One of
Johnson's staff sergeants, Charles Dohun, was "almost numb" with worry.
He did "not know how to compare this daylight jump with Normandy or
what to expect." Within forty-eight hours, his numbness forgotten,
Staff Sergeant Dohun would heroically save the life of the fatalistic
Captain Johnson.

Technical Sergeant Marshall Copas, twenty-two, had perhaps more reason
than most for anxiety. He was one of the "pathfinders" who would jump
first to mark the drop zones for the 101/. In the Normandy drop, Copas
recalled, "we had forty-five minutes before the main body of troopers
began jumping--now we had only twelve minutes." Copas and his friend
Sergeant John Rudolph Brandt, twenty-nine, had one concern in common:
both would have felt better "had General Patton's Third Army been on
the ground below us, rather than the British. We had never fought with
the Tommies before."

In the Grantham area, Private John Garzia, a veteran of three combat
jumps with the 82nd Airborne Division, was stunned. To him,
Market-Garden "was sheer insanity." He thought "Ike had transferred to
the German side."

Now that Operation Market-Garden was actually on, Lieu-

tenant Colonel Louis Mendez, battalion commander of the 82nd's 508th
Regiment, had no hesitation in speaking out on one particular subject.
With the nighttime experiences of his regiment in Normandy still
painfully clear in his mind, Colonel Mendez delivered a scathing
warning to the pilots who would carry his battalion into action the
next day. "Gentlemen," Mendez said coldly, "my officers know this map
of Holland and the drop zones by heart and we're ready to go. When I
brought my battalion to the briefing prior to Normandy, I had the
finest combat-ready force of its size that will ever be known. By the
time I gathered them together in Normandy, half were gone. I charge
you: put us down in Holland or put us down in hell, but put us all down
together in one place."

Private First Class John Allen, twenty-four, a three-jump veteran and
still recovering from wounds sustained in Normandy, was philosophical
about the operation: "They never got me in a night jump," he solemnly
told his buddies, "so now they'll be able to see me and get off a good
shot." Staff Sergeant Russell O'ationeal, with three night combat
jumps behind him, was convinced that his "Irish luck was about to run
out." When he heard the 82nd was to jump in daylight, he composed a
letter he never sent--"You can hang a gold star in your window tonight,
Mother. The Germans have a good chance to hit us before we even land."
To lighten the atmosphere--though in doing so he may have made it
worse--Private Philip H. Nadler, of the 504th Regiment, spread a few
rumors. The one he liked best was that a large German camp of SS men
were bivouacked on one of the 82nd drop zones.

Nadler had not been overly impressed by the briefing of the platoon.
One of the 504th's objectives was the bridge at Grave. Gathering the
men around him, the briefing lieutenant threw back the cover on a
sandtable model and said, "Men, this is your destination." He rested a
pointer on the bridge which bore the single word "Grave." Nadler was
the first to comment. "Yeah, we know that, Lieutenant," he said, "but
what country are we droppin' on?"

Major Edward Wellems, of the 504th's 2nd Battalion, thought

the name of the bridge was rather ominous, too, despite the fact that
the officers who briefed his group suddenly began to change the
pronunciation, referring to it as the "gravey bridge."

The briefings caused mixed reactions. Nineteen-year-old Corporal Jack
Bommer thought that "six or eight weeks would see us home and then
they'd send us on to the Pacific." Private Leo Hart, twenty-one, did
not believe they were going at all. He had heard-- probably as a
result of Private Nadler's rumor--that there were 4,000 SS troops in
the general jump area.

Major Edwin Bedell, thirty-eight, remembers that one private's sole
concern was the safety of a live hare that he had won in a local
village raffle. The private was fearful that his pet, which was so
tame that it followed him everywhere, would not survive the jump, and
that if it did it might still wind up in a stew pot.

Near Spanhoe airfield in the Grantham area, Lieutenant "Pat" Glover of
the British 1/ Airborne Division's 4th Parachute Brigade worried about
Myrtle, a reddish-brown chicken that had been Glover's special pet
since early summer. With parachute wings fastened to an elastic band
around her neck, Myrtle "the parachick" had made six training jumps.
At first she rode in a small zippered canvas bag attached to Glover's
left shoulder. Later, he released her at fifty feet above the ground.
By now Myrtle was an expert, and Glover could free her at three hundred
feet. With a frenzied flutter of wings and raucous squawking, Myrtle
gracelessly floated down to earth. There, Glover recalls, "this rather
gentle pet would wait patiently on the ground for me to land and
collect her." Myrtle the parachick was going to Arnhem. It would be
her first combat jump. But Glover did not intend to tempt fate. He
planned to keep Myrtle in her bag until he hit the ground in Holland.

Lance Corporal Sydney Nunn, twenty-three, of the 1/ Airlanding Brigade,
based in the south near Keevil, was only too glad to get away from his
"pet." He thought the camp was "a nightmare." Nunn couldn't wait to
get to Arnhem or anyplace else, so long as it was far enough away from
the persistent mole who kept burrowing into his mattress.

For the men of the British 1/ Airborne Division, now standing by in
bases stretching from the Midlands south to Dorsetshire, the prevailing
mood was one of relief that, at last, they were going into action.
Besides, briefing officers stressed the fact that Market-Garden could
shorten the war. For the British, fighting since 1939, the news was
heady. Sergeant Ron Kent, of the 21/ Independent Parachute Company,
heard that "the success of the operation might even give us Berlin" and
that ground opposition in Arnhem "would consist mainly of Hitler Youth
and old men on bicycles." Sergeant Walter Inglis, of the 1/ Parachute
Brigade, was equally confident. The attack, he thought, would be "a
piece of cake." All the Red Devils had to do was "hang on to the
Arnhem bridge for forty-eight hours until XXX Corps tanks arrived; then
the war would be practically over." Inglis expected to be back home in
England in a week. Lance Corporal Gordon Spicer, of the 1/ Parachute
Brigade, offhandedly considered the operation "a fairly simple affair
with a few backstage Germans recoiling in horror at our approach";
while Lance Bombardier Percy Parkes, of the 1/ Airlanding Brigade,
felt, after his briefing, that "all we would encounter at Arnhem was a
mixed bag of Jerry cooks and clerks." The presence of tanks, Parkes
says, was "mentioned only in passing, and we were told our air cover
would be so strong that it would darken the sky above us." Confidence
was such that Medic Geoffrey Stanners expected only "a couple of hernia
battalions" and Signalman Victor Read was "looking forward to seeing
German WAAF'S who," he thought, "would be the only Germans defending
Arnhem."

Some men who could legitimately remain behind were eager to go.
Sergeant Alfred Roullier, of the 1/ Airlanding Brigade's Artillery, was
one of these. The thirty-one-year-old trooper discovered that he was
not slated for the Arnhem operation. Although Roullier had been
trained as an artilleryman, he was currently the acting mess sergeant
at his battalion headquarters. Because of his culinary expertise, it
appeared that he might spend the remainder of the war in the job.
Twice, Alf Roullier had appealed to Sergeant Major John Siely to be
included in the

attack, but each time he was turned down. For the third time Alf
pressed his case. "I know this operation can shorten the war," he told
Siely. "I've got a wife and two children, but if this attack will get
me home quicker and guarantee them a better future, then I want to go."
Siely pulled a few strings. Alf Roullier's name was added to the list
of those who would go to Arnhem --where, within the next week, the
assistant mess sergeant would become something of a legend.

In the prevailing high mood before the onset of Market-Garden, there
were undercurrents of doubt among some officers and enlisted men. They
were troubled for a variety of reasons, although most took care to hide
their feelings. Corporal Daniel Morgans, of the 1/ Parachute Brigade,
considered "Market a snorter of an operation." Still, "to drop six or
seven miles from the objective and then to fight through a city to get
there, was really asking for trouble." Regimental Sergeant Major J. C.
Lord, with a lifetime in the army behind him, thought so, too. "The
plan was a bit dicey," he felt. Nor did Lord give much credence to the
talk of an understrength, worn-out enemy. He knew that "the German is
no fool and a mighty warrior." Still, J. C. Lord, whose demeanor could
intimidate even the veterans in his charge (almost in awe, some called
him "Jesus Christ" behind his back), did not reveal his uneasiness,
because "it would have been catastrophic to morale."

Captain Eric Mackay, whose engineers were, among other tasks, to race
to the main road bridge in Arnhem and remove expected German charges,
was suspicious of the entire operation. He thought the division "might
just as well be dropped a hundred miles away from the objective as
eight." The advantage of surprise and "a quick lightning stroke" would
surely be lost. Mackay quietly ordered his men to double the amount of
ammunition and grenades each would carry and personally briefed
everyone in the troop on escape techniques. * * One of the most
accurate accounts of the First British Airborne's activities on the
Arnhem bridge is to be found in "The Battle of Arnhem Bridge" by Eric
Mackay, Blackwood's Magazine, October 1945.

Major Anthony Deane-Drummond, twenty-seven, second in command of 1/
Airborne Division Signals, was particularly concerned about his
communications. Apart from the main command units, he was worried
about the smaller "22" sets that would be used between Urquhart and the
various brigades during the Arnhem attack. The "22's" could best
transmit and receive within a diameter of three to five miles. With
drop zones seven to eight miles from the objective, performance was
expected to be erratic. Worse, the sets must also contact General
Browning's Airborne Corps headquarters, planned for Nijmegen, from the
drop zones approximately fifteen miles to the south. Adding to the
problem was the terrain. Between the main road bridge at Arnhem and
the landing areas was the town itself, plus heavily wooded sections and
suburban developments. On the other hand, an independent
fact-gathering liaison unit, called "Phantom"--organized to collect and
pass on intelligence estimates and immediate reports to each commander
in the field, in this case General Browning of Airborne Corps--was not
worried about the range of its own "22's." Twenty-five-year-old
Lieutenant Neville Hay, in charge of the Phantom team's highly trained
specialists, was even a "little disdainful of the Royal Corps of
Signals," whom his group was inclined to treat "as poor cousins." By
using a special kind of antenna, Hay and his operators had been able to
transmit at distances of over one hundred miles on a "22."

Even with Hay's success and although various forms of communications *
would be used in the event of emergency, Deane-Drummond was uneasy. He
mentioned to his superior, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Stephenson, that "the
likelihood of the sets working satisfactorily in the initial phases of
the operation is very doubtful." Stephenson agreed. Still, it would
hardly matter. In the surprise assault, troops were expected to close
up on the Arnhem bridge very quickly. Therefore, it was believed that
units would not be out of touch with headquarters for more than one or
* Included in the communications setup were 82 pigeons provided from
R.a.f. sources. The lofts for these birds were situated in the London
area--meaning that the birds, if they survived the airborne landing and
the Germans, would have to fly approximately 240 miles to deliver a
message.

two hours, by which time, Deane-Drummond heard, "things would have
sorted themselves out and Urquhart's command post would be with the 1/
Parachute Brigade on the bridge itself." Although not entirely
reassured, Deane-Drummond recalled that, "like almost everyone else, I
was swept along with the prevailing attitude: "Don't be negative; and
for God's sake, don't rock the boat; let's get on with the attack.""

Now the final word depended not on men but on the weather. From
Supreme Command headquarters down, senior officers anxiously awaited
meteorological reports. Given less than seven days to meet
Montgomery's deadline, Market-Garden was as ready as it would ever be,
but a minimum forecast of three full days of fair weather was needed.
In the early evening of September 16, the weather experts issued their
findings: apart from some early morning fog, the weather for the next
three days would be fair, with little cloud and virtually no winds. At
First Allied Airborne Army headquarters Lieutenant General Brereton
quickly made his decision. The coded teleprinter message that went out
to his commanders at 7:45 P.m. read, "Confirm Market Sunday 17th.
Acknowledge." In his diary, Brereton recorded, "At last we are going
into action." He thought he would sleep well this night for, as he
told his staff, "Now that I've made the decision, I've quit
worrying."

In crowded hangars, cities of tents and Nissen huts, the waiting men
were given the news. On a large mirror over the fireplace in the
sergeants' mess of the British 1/ Airborne Division Signals near
Grantham, someone chalked up "14 hours to go ... no cancellation."
Sergeant Horace "Hocker" Spivey noted that, as each hour passed, the
number was rechalked. To Spivey, tired of being briefed for operations
that never came off, the ever-dimin-

ishing number on the mirror was the best proof yet that this time "we
were definitely going."

On all their bases the men of the First Allied Airborne Army made
last-minute preparations. They had been fully briefed, their weapons
had been checked and their currency exchanged for Dutch guilders, and
there was little now for the isolated troopers to do but wait. Some
spent the time writing letters, "celebrating" their departure the
following morning, packing personal belongings, sleeping or
participating in marathon card games ranging from blackjack and poker
to bridge. Twenty-year-old Sergeant Francis Moncur, of the 1/
Parachute Brigade's 2nd Battalion, played blackjack hour after hour.
To his surprise, he won steadily. Looking at the ever-growing pile of
guilders before him, Moncur felt like a millionaire. He expected to
have a "whale of a time in Arnhem after the battle," which, in his
opinion, would "last only forty-eight hours." That would be long
enough for the sergeant to settle a score with the Germans.
Seventy-two hours earlier, Moncur's brother, a seventeen-year-old
R.a.f. flight sergeant, had been killed in an attempt to jump from his
disabled bomber at 200 feet. His parachute had failed to open
completely.

South of Grantham at a base in Cottesmore, Sergeant "Joe" Sunley of the
4th Parachute Brigade was on security patrol, making sure that "no
paratroopers had slipped off base into the village." Returning to the
airdrome, Sunley saw Sergeant "Ginger" Green, a physical-training
instructor and a "gentle giant of a man," tossing a deflated football
up in the air. Green deftly caught the ball and threw it to Sunley.
"What the hell are you doing with this?" Sunley asked. Ginger
explained that he was taking the deflated ball to Arnhem, "so we can
have a little game on the drop zone after we're finished."

At Manston, Kent, Staff Sergeant George Baylis of the Glider Pilot
Regiment was also looking forward to some recreation. He had heard
that the Dutch liked to dance; so George carefully packed his dancing
pumps. Signalman Stanley G. Copley of the 1/ Parachute Brigade Signals
bought extra film for his camera. As little opposition was expected he
thought it was "a perfect

chance to get some pictures of the Dutch countryside and towns."

One man was taking presents that he had bought in London a few days
earlier. When the Netherlands was overrun, thirty-two-year-old
Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters of the Dutch navy had escaped in
his minesweeper and sailed to England. Since that time, he had been
attached to the Netherlands government in exile, holding a variety of
desk jobs dealing with information and intelligence. A few days
earlier, Wolters had been asked to go to Holland as part of the
military government and civil affairs team attached to General
Urquhart's headquarters. It was proposed that Wolters become military
commissioner of the Netherlands territories to be liberated by the
airborne forces. "It was a startling suggestion--going from a desk
chair to a glider," he recalled. He was attached to a unit under
Colonel Hilary Barlow, second in command of the 1/ Airlanding Brigade,
who was designated to become the town commandant in Arnhem after its
capture. Wolters would be his assistant. Now, excited about the
prospect of returning to Holland, Wolters "was struck by the optimism,
and I believed everything I was told. I really did not expect the
operation to be very difficult. It seemed that the war was virtually
over and the attack dead easy. I expected to land on Sunday and be
home on Tuesday with my wife and child at Hilversum." For his wife,
Maria, Wolters had bought a watch, and for his daughter, whom he had
last seen as a baby four years before, he had a two-foot Teddy bear.
He hoped nobody would mind if he took it in the glider.

Lieutenant Colonel John Frost, thirty-one, who was to lead the
battalion assigned to capture the Arnhem bridge, packed his copper
fox-hunting horn with the rest of his battle gear. It had been
presented to him by the members of the Royal Exodus Hunt, of which he
was Master in 1939-40. During training, Frost had used the horn to
rally his men. He would do so on this operation. Frost had no qualms
about a daylight jump. From the information given at briefings, "we
were made to feel that the Germans were weak and demoralized and German
troops in the area were of a decidedly low category and badly
equipped." Frost did have misgivings about the drop zones. He had
been told that the "polder on the southern side of the bridge was
unsuitable for parachutists and gliders." Why then, he wondered, were
the Poles to drop on the southern side of the bridge "if it was so
unsuitable?"

Though he was anxious to get into action, Frost "hated to leave for
Holland." Secretly, he hoped for a last-minute cancellation or
postponement. He had enjoyed the area of Stoke Rochford in
Lincolnshire and wished for "perhaps another day or two just doing all
the pleasant things I had done in the past." But with these thoughts
were others, "telling me that we had been here long enough and it was
time to get away." Frost slept soundly on September 16. Although he
wasn't na@ive enough to think the battle of Arnhem would be "much of a
lark," he did tell his batman, Wicks, to pack his gun, cartridges, golf
clubs and dinner jacket in the staff car that would follow.

On the mirror above the fireplace in the sergeants' mess, now empty,
there was one last notation, scrawled before men became too busy to
bother. It read: "2 hours to go ... no cancellation."

Part Three THE ATTACK

The thunder of the huge formations was earsplitting. Around British
glider bases in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, horses and cattle
panicked and bolted in the fields. In southern and eastern England
thousands of people watched in amazement. In some villages and towns
road traffic jammed and came to a halt. Passengers in speeding trains
crowded one another to stare out of windows. Everywhere people gaped,
dumfounded, at a spectacle no one had ever seen before. The mightiest
airborne force in history was off the ground and heading for its
targets.

By coincidence on this bright Sunday morning, September 17, 1944,
special services were being held all over England to commemorate "the
valiant few," the handful of R.a.f. pilots who had boldly challenged
Hitler's Luftwaffe four years before and fought them to a standstill.
As worshipers knelt in prayer, the steady, overpowering drone of
propellers completely drowned out some services. In London's great
Westminster Cathedral the soaring organ tones of the solemn Magnificat
could not be heard. In twos and threes, people left their pews to join
the crowds already gathered in the streets. There, Londoners stared
upward, overwhelmed by the din as formation after formation of aircraft
passed overhead at low altitude. In north London, a Salvation Army
band overpowered by the noise gave up, but the bass drummer, his eyes
on the sky, thumped out a symbolic beat: three dots and a dash--in
Morse code, V for victory.

To the onlookers, the nature of the attack was clearly revealed by the
great streams of planes towing gliders. But it would be six more hours
before the British people learned that they had witnessed the opening
phase of the most momentous airborne offensive ever conceived. A Red
Cross worker, Angela Hawkings, may have best summed up the reactions of
those who saw the vast armada pass. From the window of a train, she
stared up, astonished, as wave after wave of planes flew over like
"droves of starlings." She was convinced that "this attack, wherever
bound, must surely bring about the end of the war."

The men of the First Allied Airborne Army were as unprepared as the
civilians on the ground for the awesome spectacle of their own
departure. The paratroopers, glider-borne infantry and pilots who set
out for Holland were staggered by the size and majesty of the air
fleets. Captain Arie D. Bestebreurtje, a Dutch officer attached to the
82nd Airborne, thought the sight was "unbelievable. Every plane the
Allies possessed must have been engaged in this single scheme." In
fact, some 4,700 aircraft were involved--the greatest number ever used
on a single airborne mission.

The operation had begun in the predawn hours and continued on
throughout the morning. First, more than 1,400 Allied bombers had
taken off from British airfields and had pounded German antiaircraft
positions and troop concentrations in the Market-Garden area. Then, at
9:45 A.m. and for two and one quarter hours more, 2,023 troop-carrying
planes, gliders and their tugs swarmed into the air from twenty-four
U.s. and British bases. * C-47's carrying paratroopers flew in long
45-plane formations. More C-47's and British bombers--Halifaxes,
Stirlings and Albemarles--pulled 478 gliders. In seemingly endless sky
trains, these huge equipment- and troop-carrying gliders bounced behind
their tow planes at the end of 300-foot-long ropes. Swaying among the
smaller Horsa and Waco gliders were massive slab- * Many official
accounts give 10:25 A.m. as the time when the first Market aircraft
left the ground. Perhaps they had in mind the departure of the
pathfinders, who arrived first. From an examination of log books and
air controllers' time schedules, it is clear that the airlift began at
9:45 A.m.

sided Hamilcars, each with a cargo capacity of eight tons; they could
hold a small tank or two 3-ton trucks with artillery or ammunition.
Above, below and on the flanks, protecting these huge formations, were
almost 1,500 Allied fighters and fighter-bombers-- British Spitfires,
rocket-firing Typhoons, Tempests and Mosquitoes; U.s. Thunderbolts,
Lightnings, Mustangs and low-level dive bombers. There were so many
planes in the air that Captain Neil Sweeney of the 101/ Airborne
Division remembered that "it looked like we could get out on the wings
and walk all the way to Holland."

The British glider forces were the first to take off. Farther north on
the Market-Garden corridor than the Americans and with different
requirements, General Urquhart needed the maximum in men, equipment and
artillery-- especially antitank guns--in the first lift, to capture and
hold his objectives until the land forces could link up. Therefore,
the bulk of his division was glider-borne; 320 gliders carried the men,
transport and artillery of Brigadier Philip "Pips" Hicks's 1/
Airlanding Brigade. They would reach landing zones west of Arnhem a
little after 1 P.m. Thirty minutes later, Brigadier Gerald Lathbury's
1/ Parachute Brigade, in 145 troop-carrying planes, would begin
dropping. Because the unwieldy gliders and tugs were slower--120 miles
per hour versus 140 for the paratroop-carrier planes--these immense
"sky trains"--or serials, as the airborne called them--had to be
launched first. From eight bases in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire,
gliders and tugs rolled down runways and rose in the air at a launch
rate never before attempted: one combination per minute. Forming up
was especially intricate and dangerous. Climbing slowly to altitude,
the planes headed west over the Bristol Channel. Then, speeds
synchronized, the tugs and gliders echeloned to the right in pairs,
turned back, flew over the takeoff bases and headed for a marshaling
point above the town of Hatfield, north of London.

Even as the first British glider serials were forming up above the
Bristol Channel, twelve British Stirling bombers and six U.s.

C-47's began taking off at 10:25 A.m. for Holland. In them were U.s.
and British pathfinders--the men who would land first to mark landing
and drop zones for the Market forces.

Simultaneously, the men of the U.s. 82nd Airborne and the paratroop
elements of the British First Division took off from bases around
Grantham, Lincolnshire, in 625 troop-carrier planes and 50 C-47's
towing gliders. With astonishing precision, the planes of the IX Troop
Carrier Command left the ground at five- to twenty-second intervals.
In wave after wave they rendezvoused above the town of March,
Cambridgeshire, and from there set out in three parallel streams to
cross the coast at Aldeburgh.

At the same time, from southern airfields around Greenham Common, the
101/ Airborne took to the air, in 424 C-47,'s plus 70 gliders and tugs.
Forming up, they too passed over the traffic control point at Hatfield
and flew east to cross the coast at Bradwell Bay.

In immense triple columns, together at least ten miles across and
approximately a hundred miles long, the vast armada swept over the
English countryside. The 82nd Airborne and British 1/ Division,
enroute to Nijmegen and Arnhem, flew along the northern track. A
special serial of 38 gliders carrying General Browning's Corps
headquarters, bound for Nijmegen, traveled with them. On the southern
route, passing over Bradwell Bay, the 101/ Airborne headed for its drop
zones slightly north of Eindhoven. By 11:55 A.m., the entire force
--more than 20,000 troops, 511 vehicles, 330 artillery pieces and 590
tons of equipment--was off the ground. First Lieutenant James J. Coyle
of the 82nd Airborne, looking down on the English countryside from an
altitude of only 1,500 feet, saw nuns waving from the courtyard of a
convent. He thought "the beautiful day and the nuns made a picture
that had the quality of an oil painting." Waving back, he wondered "if
they could possibly know who we were and where we were going."

For the majority of the airborne troops, the mood of the initial

part of the journey, across England, was lighthearted. To Private Roy
Edwards of the 1/ Parachute Brigade, "everything was so serene it was
like going on a bus outing to the seaside." Private A. G. Warrender
remembers that "this was a perfect Sunday; a morning for a walk down a
country lane and a pint at the local."

The commanding officer of the Glider Pilot Regiment, Colonel George S.
Chatterton, piloting the glider carrying General Browning, described
the Sunday as "an extremely fine day. It did not seem possible that we
were taking off for one of the greatest battles in history."
Chatterton was struck by Browning's entourage and equipment. With the
General were his batman, headquarters' medical officer, cook, as well
as his tent and personal jeep. Browning sat on an empty Worthington
Beer crate between the pilot and copilot, and Chatterton noted that he
was "immaculately dressed in a Barathea battle dress, with a highly
polished Sam Browne belt, knife-edge-creased trousers, leather holster
gleaming like glass, a swagger stick and spotless gray kid gloves."
The General, says Chatterton, "was in tremendous form, because he
realized he had reached one of the climaxes of his career. There was
an air of immense gaiety."

In another glider serial, the quiet Scot with the most difficult
Market-Garden assignment, the 1/ Airborne Division's General Roy
Urquhart, thought it was "difficult not to feel excited that we were
off at last." Yet the popular officer's mind, as always, was on his
men and the job that lay ahead. Like Browning, he had an entourage.
Now, looking down the length of the Horsa glider--which was carrying
his aide Roberts, batman Hancock, the Reverend G. A. Pare, padre of the
Glider Pilot Regiment, a signaler, two military police, their
motorcycles and the General's jeep--Urquhart felt a pang of conscience.
He thought of his paratroopers, laden down with packs, guns and
equipment, crowded into heavy transport planes. Urquhart carried only
a small shoulder pack, two hand grenades, a map case and a notebook.
He was bothered by his own comfort.

Almost up to the moment of takeoff Urquhart had been called

on to make difficult decisions. Some hours before leaving, his chief
of staff, Colonel Charles Mackenzie, had received a telephone call from
a senior American air force officer. Was the mental asylum at Wolfheze
to be bombed? The American, Mackenzie had reported, "wanted a personal
assurance from Urquhart that there were Germans in it and not lunatics;
otherwise the Americans could not accept responsibility." The asylum
was dangerously close to the division's assembly point, and Urquhart's
staff believed it to be held by the Germans. Mackenzie had accepted
responsibility. "On your head be it," the American had replied.
Urquhart had approved his chief of staff's action. "I meant to be as
prepared as possible and that's all there was to it," he remembered.

As Mackenzie was about to leave for his own glider, Urquhart had taken
him privately aside. "Look, Charles," he had told Mackenzie, "if
anything happens to me the succession of command should be as follows:
first, Lathbury, then Hicks and Hackett in that order." Urquhart's
choice was based on experience. "Everyone knew that Lathbury was my
deputy," he later recalled. "Hackett was senior in rank to Hicks, but
he was much younger and I was quite convinced that Hicks had more
experience in handling infantry. My decision was no reflection on
Hackett's ability to command." Perhaps, Urquhart reflected, he should
have informed each of his brigadiers of his decision earlier, but he
had "frankly considered the whole question quite academic." The chance
of the division losing both Urquhart and Lathbury was remote.

Now, all decisions made, Urquhart idly watched "squadrons of fighters
flashing past the glider trains." This was his first operational trip
in a glider, and earlier he had taken a couple of airsickness pills.
His throat was dry and he had difficulty swallowing. He was conscious,
too, that "Hancock, my batman, was watching me, a look of concern on
his face. Like everyone else, he expected me to be airsick." Urquhart
did not oblige. "We were in a huge stream of aircraft and I
concentrated on impressions. We were committed. We had made a good
plan. I still wished we

could have gotten closer to the bridge, but I did not brood on it."

In spite of the operational efficiency displayed in launching the giant
armada, mishaps occurred almost immediately. Just before takeoff, the
port wing of one glider was chewed off by the propeller of a Stirling
bomber. No one was hurt. As the glider carrying Lieutenant Alan
Harvey Cox of the Airlanding Brigade lumbered into the air, it ran into
trouble. Low clouds obstructed the glider pilot's view and he was
unable to line up with the tail of his tug. The glider went in one
direction, the plane in another, the tow rope threatening to loop the
glider's wing and overturn it. Unable to realign with his tug, the
glider pilot grabbed for the red-topped release lever and cast off.
Cox's glider landed without damage in a hay field at
Sandford-on-Thames. A more bizarre incident occurred in a C-47
carrying the men of the 82nd Airborne, who sat facing each other on
opposite sides of the plane. Five minutes after takeoff, Corporal Jack
Bommer saw "the cargo hatch directly behind the men facing me spring
open." The force of air almost sucked the men through the hatchway
into space. As they desperately hung on, recalls Bommer, "the pilot
did a beautiful tail flip and the hatch slammed shut."

Lance Corporal Sydney Nunn, who was so anxious to leave his base near
Keevil and the activities of the mole in his mattress, now felt lucky
to be alive. After more than an hour of uneventful flight, his glider
ran into cloud. Emerging from the cloud bank, the glider pilot saw
that the tow rope had twisted itself around the port wing. Over the
intercom to his tug, Nunn heard the glider pilot say, "I'm in trouble!
I'm in trouble!" The next instant, he cast off. "We seemed to come to
a dead stop in the air," Nunn remembers. "Then the glider's nose
dropped and we careened earthward with the tow rope streaming alongside
like a broken kite string." Nunn sat "petrified," listening to the
wind screaming along the fuselage, "hoping that the chains holding a
jeep in the glider would take the strain." Then he heard the pilot
warn them to "Brace up, blokes. Here we come." The glider hit the
ground, bounced, hit once more, and came slowly to a stop. In the
sudden

silence, Nunn heard the pilot ask, "Are you blokes all right?"
Everyone was, and the men were returned to Keevil to fly out in the
second lift on September 18.

Others were not so fortunate. Tragedy struck one glider serial over
Wiltshire. R.a.f. Sergeant Walter Simpson, sitting in the plexiglass
turret of a Stirling bomber, was watching the Horsa glider trailing
along behind. Suddenly, "The glider just seemed to part in the middle;
it looked as if the back end just dropped off the front." Horrified,
Simpson shouted to the captain, "My God, the glider's coming apart!"
The tow rope broke and the front of the glider sank "like a rock
falling to earth." The Stirling left formation, gradually lost height,
and turned back to locate the wreckage. The front half was spotted in
a field. The tail was nowhere to be seen. Marking the spot, the crew
returned to Keevil and drove by jeep to the crash location. There,
Simpson saw what appeared "like a match box that had been stepped on."
The bodies of the men had remained inside. Simpson had no way of
estimating how many dead there were--"it was just a mass of arms, legs
and bodies."

By the time the last serials reached the English coast--the northern
streams passing over the checkpoint at Aldeburgh, the southern columns
flying over Bradwell Bay--thirty troop- and equipment-carrying gliders
were down. Tug engine failure, broken tow ropes, and, in places, heavy
clouds had caused the abortions. Although by military standards the
operation had begun with eminent success-- casualties were light, and
many of the men and most of the downed cargo would be flown in on later
lifts--the losses were sure to hurt. On this vital day when every man,
vehicle and piece of equipment was important to General Urquhart,
twenty-three of his glider loads were already lost. Not until the
Arnhem force reached its drop and landing zones would commanders
discover just how crucial these losses would be.

Now, as the long sky trains swarmed out over the English Channel and
the land fell behind, a new kind of expectancy began to permeate the
armada. The "Sunday outing" mood was fast disappearing. As American
serials passed over the seaside

resort of Margate, Private Melvin Isenekev of the 101/ Airborne saw the
white cliffs of Dover off to the right. From the distance, they looked
like the wintry hillsides of the Adirondacks near his home in upper New
York State. Corporal D. Thomas of the 1/ British Airborne, staring out
through an open plane door until his country's coastline disappeared,
felt his eyes fill with tears.

From the marshaling points at March and Hatfield, the airborne columns
had been aided by various navigational devices: radar beacons, special
hooded lights and radio direction-finding signals. Now, beacons on
ships in the North Sea began to guide the planes. Additionally,
strings of launches--17 along the northern route; 10 below the southern
flight path--stretched away across the water. To Flight Sergeant
William Tompson, at the controls of a plane towing a four-ton Horsa
glider, "there wasn't much navigating to do. The launches below us
were set out like stepping stones across the Channel." But these fast
naval vessels were much more than directional aids. They were part of
a vast air-sea rescue operation, and they were already busy.

In the thirty-minute trip across the North Sea, men saw gliders bobbing
on the gray waters as low-flying amphibious planes circled to mark
their positions until rescue launches could reach the spot. Lieutenant
Neville Hay, of the Phantom fact-gathering liaison unit, watched "with
complete detachment two downed gliders and another ditching." He
tapped his corporal on the shoulder. "Have a look down there,
Hobkirk," Hay shouted. The corporal glanced down and, as Hay
remembers, "I could almost see him turn green." Hay hurriedly
reassured the man. "There's nothing to worry about. Look at the boats
already picking them up."

Staff Sergeant Joseph Kitchener, piloting a glider, was equally
impressed by the speed of the air-sea rescue launch that came alongside
a floating glider he had spotted. "They picked up the men so fast I
don't even think they got their feet wet," he recalls. Men in a glider
piloted by Staff Sergeant Cyril Line were less fortunate--but lucky to
be alive. In an aerial train of swaying black Horsas, Line observed
one combination drop slowly out of

position. Mesmerized, he watched the Horsa cut loose and descend
almost leisurely toward the sea. A ring of white foam appeared as it
hit the water. He wondered "who the poor devils were." At that
moment, the starboard propellers on the Stirling pulling his glider
slowed, and stopped. As the plane's speed was reduced Line found
himself "in the embarrassing position of overtaking my own tug." He
immediately released the tow line and his copilot called out, "Stand by
for ditching!" From behind in the cabin, they could hear rifle butts
crashing against the side of the glider's plywood fuselage as the
frantic passengers tried to open up an escape route. Rapidly losing
altitude, Line looked back and was horrified to see that the desperate
troopers had "cut through the top of the glider and the sides were just
beginning to go." Line screamed out, "Stop that! Strap yourselves
in!" Then, with a heavy thud, the glider hit the water. When Line
surfaced, he saw the wreckage floating some thirty feet away. There
was no sign whatever of the cabin, but every one of his passengers was
accounted for. Within minutes, all were picked up.

In all, eight gliders ditched safely during this first lift; once they
were on the water, the air-sea rescue service, in a spectacular
performance, saved nearly all crews and passengers. Once again,
however, it was Urquhart's force that was whittled down. Of the eight
gliders, five were Arnhem-bound.

Apart from some long-range inaccurate shelling of a downed glider,
there was no serious enemy opposition during the Channel crossing. The
101/ Airborne Division, following the southern route, which would bring
it over Allied-held Belgium, was experiencing an almost perfect flight.
But as the Dutch coastline appeared in the distance, the 82nd and the
British troopers in the northern columns began to see the ominous
telltale gray and black puffs of flak-- German antiaircraft fire. As
they flew on, at an altitude of only 1,500 feet, enemy guns firing from
the outer Dutch isles of Walcheren, North Beveland and Schouwen were
clearly visible. So were flak ships and barges around the mouth of the
Schelde.

Escorting fighters began peeling out of formation, engaging the

gun positions. In the planes men could hear spent shrapnel scraping
against the metal sides of the C-47's. Veteran paratrooper Private Leo
Hart of the 82nd heard a rookie aboard his plane ask, "Are these bucket
seats bullet proof?" Hart just glowered at him; the light metal seats
wouldn't have offered protection against a well-thrown stone. Private
Harold Brockley, in another C-47, remembers one replacement wondering,
"Hey, what are all those little black and gray puffs below?" Before
anyone could answer, a piece of shrapnel came through the bottom of the
ship and pinged harmlessly against a mess kit.

Veteran troopers hid their fears in different ways. When Staff
Sergeant Paul Nunan saw the "familiar golf balls of red tracer bullets
weaving up toward us" he pretended to doze off. Tracers barely missed
Private Kenneth Truax's plane. "No one said anything," he recalls.
"There was only a weak smile or two." Sergeant Bill Tucker, who had
gone through antiaircraft fire in Normandy, was haunted by a "horrible
fear of getting hit from underneath." He felt "less naked" sitting on
three air-force flak jackets. And Private Rudolph Kos remembers that
he felt "like sitting on my helmet, but I knew I would need it on my
head."

One man was more concerned with the danger within than that without.
Copilot Sergeant Bill Oakes, struggling to hold his Horsa glider steady
in the air, looked back to see how his passengers were faring. To his
horror, three troopers were "calmly sitting on the floor brewing up a
mess tin of tea over a small cooker. Five others were standing around
with their mugs, waiting to be served." Oakes was galvanized into
action. He handed the controls over to the pilot and hurried aft,
expecting the glider's plywood floor to catch fire at any minute. "Or,
worse still, the mortar bombs in the trailer we were carrying could
explode. The heat from that little field stove was terrific." He was
livid with anger. "We're just having a little brew up," one of the
troopers told him soothingly. Oakes hurried back to the cockpit and
reported the matter to the pilot, Staff Sergeant Bert Watkins. The
pilot smiled. "Tell 'em not to forget us when the tea's ready," he
said. Oakes sank into his seat and buried his head in his hands.

Although the escort fighters silenced most of the coastal flak
positions, some planes were damaged and one tug, its glider and a
troop-carrier C-47 were shot down over Schouwen Island. The tug
crash-landed, and its crew was killed. The glider, an 82nd Airborne
Waco, broke up in mid-air and may have been seen by Major Dennis
Munford, flying in a British column nearby. He watched, aghast, as the
Waco disintegrated and "men and equipment spilt out of it like toys
from a Christmas cracker." Others saw the troop-carrier go down.
Equipment bundles attached beneath the C-47 were set on fire by tracer
bullets. "Yellow and red streamers of flame appeared in the black
smoke," recalls Captain Arthur Ferguson, who was flying in a nearby
plane. Within minutes the C-47 was blazing. First Lieutenant Virgil
Carmichael, standing in the door of his plane, watched as paratroopers
jumped from the stricken aircraft. "As our men were using camouflaged
chutes, I was able to count them as they left and saw that all had
escaped safely."

The pilot, although the aircraft was engulfed in flames, somehow kept
the plane steady until the paratroopers jumped. Then Carmichael saw
one more figure leave. "The Air Corps used white parachutes, so I
figured he had to be the crew chief." He was the last man out. Almost
immediately the blazing plane nosedived and, at full throttle, plowed
into a flooded area of Schouwen Island below. Carmichael remembers
that, "on impact, a white chute billowed out in front of the plane,
probably ejected by the force of the crash." To First Lieutenant James
Megellas the sight of the downed C-47 had a "terrible effect." As
jumpmaster in his plane, he had previously told his men that he would
give the command "to stand up and hook up five minutes before reaching
the drop zone." Now, he immediately gave the order. In many other
planes, jumpmasters reacted as Megellas had and gave similar commands.
To them, the battle was already joined--and, in fact, the drop and
landing zones for the airborne men were now only thirty to forty
minutes away. 2

Incredibly, despite the night's widespread bombing, and now the aerial
attacks against Arnhem, Nijmegen and Eindhoven, the Germans failed to
realize what was happening. Throughout the chain of command, attention
was focused on a single threat: the renewal of the British Second
Army's offensive from its bridgehead over the Meuse-Escaut Canal.

"Commanders and troops, myself and my staff in particular, were so
overtaxed and under such severe strain in the face of our difficulties
that we thought only in terms of ground operations," recalls Colonel
General Kurt Student. Germany's illustrious airborne expert was at his
headquarters in a cottage near Vught, approximately twenty-one miles
northwest of Eindhoven, working on "red tape--a mountain of papers that
followed me even into the battlefield." Student walked out onto a
balcony, watched the bombers for a few moments, then, unconcerned,
returned to his paper work.

Lieutenant Colonel Walter Harzer, commanding officer of the 9th SS
Panzer Division Hohenstaufen, had by now transferred as much equipment
as he intended to his rival, General Heinz Harmel of the 10th SS Panzer
Division Frundsberg. Harmel, on Bittrich's orders and without Model's
knowledge, was by now in Berlin. The last flatcars containing Harzer's
"disabled" armored personnel carriers were ready to leave on a 2 P.m.
train for Germany. Having been bombed repeatedly from Normandy onward,
Harzer "paid little attention to planes." He saw nothing unusual about
the huge bomber formations over Holland. He and his

veteran tankers knew "it was routine to see bombers traveling east to
Germany and returning several times a day. My men and I were numb from
constant shelling and bombing." With Major Egon Skalka, the 9th
Panzer's chief medical officer, Harzer set out from his headquarters at
Beekbergen for the Hoenderloo barracks, about eight miles north of
Arnhem. In a ceremony before the 600-man reconnaissance battalion of
the division, he would decorate its commander, Captain Paul Gr@abner,
with the Knight's Cross. Afterward there would be champagne and a
special luncheon.

At II SS Panzer Corps headquarters at Doetinchem, Lieutenant General
Wilhelm Bittrich was equally unconcerned about the air attacks. To
him, "it was routine fare." Field Marshal Walter Model, in his
headquarters at the Tafelberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, had been watching
the bomber formations for some time. The view at headquarters was
unanimous: the squadrons of Flying Fortresses were returning from their
nightly bombing of Germany, and as usual, other streams of Fortresses
in the never-ending bombing of Germany were enroute east heading for
other targets. As for the local bombing, it was not uncommon for
bombers to jettison any unused bombs over the Ruhr and often, as a
result, into Holland itself. Model and his chief of staff, Lieutenant
General Hans Krebs, believed the bombardment and low-level strafing
were "softening-up operations"--a prelude to the opening of the British
ground offensive.

One officer was mildly concerned by the increased aerial activity over
Holland. At the headquarters of OB West in Aremberg near Koblenz,
approximately 120 miles away, Field Marshal Gerd von
Rundstedt--although he still believed that airborne forces would be
used only in an attack against the Ruhr--wanted more information. In
Annex 2227 of the morning report for September 17, his operations chief
recorded that Von Rundstedt had asked Model to investigate the
possibility that a combined sea and airborne invasion was underway
against northern Holland. The notation read, "The general situation
and notable increase of enemy reconnaissance activities ... has caused
the Commander

in Chief, West, to again examine the possibilities of ship assault and
air landing operations. ... Results of the survey are to be reported
to OKW [Hitler]."

The message reached Model's headquarters at about the time the first
planes of the armada crossed the coast.

Over Arnhem at 11:30 A.m. columns of black smoke rose in the sky as
fires burned throughout the city in the aftermath of a three-hour
near-saturation bombing. In Wolfheze, Oosterbeek, Nijmegen and
Eindhoven, whole buildings were leveled, streets were cratered and
littered with debris and glass, and casualties were mounting minute by
minute. Even now, low-level fighters were strafing machine-gun and
antiaircraft positions all over the area. The mood of the Dutch,
huddling in churches, homes, cellars and shelters or, with foolhardy
courage, cycling the streets or staring from rooftops, alternated
between terror and exultation. No one knew what to believe or what
would happen next. To the south, eighty-three miles from Nijmegen,
Maastricht, the first Dutch city to be liberated, had been entered by
the U.s. First Army on September 14. Many Dutch expected American
infantry to arrive at any moment in their own towns and villages.
Radio Orange, broadcasting from London, fed this impression in a flurry
of bulletins: "The time is nearly here. What we have been waiting for
is about to happen at last. ... Owing to the rapid advance of the
Allied armies ... it is possible that the troops will not carry Dutch
money yet. If our Allies offer French or Belgian notes ... cooperate
and accept this money in payment ... Farmers should finish off and
deliver their harvest. ..." Prince Bernhard, in a radio message,
urged the Dutch "not to show joy by offering flowers or fruit when
Allied troops liberate Netherlands territory ... in the past the enemy
has concealed explosives among offerings presented to the liberators."
Uppermost in the minds of most Dutchmen was the certainty that these
intensive bombings were the prelude to Allied invasion--the

opening of the ground offensive. Like their German conquerors, the
Dutch had no inkling of the impending airborne attack.

Jan and Bertha Voskuil, taking shelter in the home of Voskuil's
father-in-law in Oosterbeek, thought the bombers in their area were
aiming for Model's headquarters in the Tafelberg Hotel. The bright
day, Voskuil remembers, "was perfect bombing weather." Yet he found it
hard to "reconcile the war that was coming with the smell of ripe
beetroots and sight of hundreds of sunflowers, their stems bent under
the weight of their great heads. It did not seem possible that men
were dying and buildings burning." Voskuil felt strangely calm. From
his father-in-law's front veranda, he watched fighters flashing
overhead and was sure they were strafing the hotel. Suddenly, a German
soldier appeared in the garden without helmet or rifle and dressed only
in a shirt and trousers. Politely he asked Voskuil, "May I take
shelter here?" Voskuil stared at the man. "Why?" he asked. "You
have your trenches." The German smiled. "I know," he answered, "but
they are full." The soldier came up on the porch. "It is a very heavy
bombing," he told Voskuil, "but I don't think Oosterbeek is the target.
They seem to be concentrating more to the east and west of the
village."

From inside the house, Voskuil heard voices. A friend of the family
had just arrived from the Wolfheze area. It had been heavily hit, she
told them, and many people were dead. "I am afraid," she said,
tremblingly, "it is our Last Supper." Voskuil looked at the German.
"Perhaps they're bombing the Tafelberg because of Model," he said
mildly. The German's face was impassive. "No," he told Voskuil, "I
don't think so. No bombs fell there." Later, after the soldier had
gone, Voskuil went out to survey the damage. Rumors abounded. He
heard that Arnhem had been heavily hit and that Wolfheze was almost
leveled. Surely, he thought, the Allies were now under march and would
arrive at any hour. He was both elated and saddened. Caen, in
Normandy, he remembered, had been reduced to rubble during the
invasion. He was convinced that Oosterbeek, where he and his family
had found shelter, would become a ruined village.

Around Wolfheze, German ammunition caches in the woods were exploding,
and the famed mental institute had received direct hits. Four
pavilions surrounding the administration building were leveled,
forty-five patients were dead (the toll would increase to over eighty),
and countless more were wounded. Sixty terrified inmates, mostly
women, were wandering about in the adjoining woods. The electricity
had failed, and Dr. Marius van der Beek, the deputy medical
superintendent, could not summon help. Impatiently he awaited the
arrival of doctors from Oosterbeek and Arnhem, who, he knew, would
surely hear the news and come. He needed to set up two operating
theaters with surgical teams as quickly as possible.

One of the "inmates," Hendrik Wijburg, was in reality a member of the
underground hiding out in the asylum. "The Germans," he recalls, "were
not actually inside the institute at the moment, although they did have
positions nearby and artillery and ammunition stored in the woods."
During the bombings when the dump was hit, Wijburg, on the veranda of
one building, was knocked to the floor. "There was a huge explosion,"
he remembers, "and shells from the dump began whizzing into the
hospital, killing and injuring many." Wijburg hastily scrambled to his
feet and helped nurses, at the height of the strafing attacks, to lay
out white sheets forming a huge cross on the grass. The entire area
had been so badly hit that it looked to him as if "the place would soon
be filled to the rafters with the dead and dying."

In Arnhem, fire brigades fought desperately to bring the spreading
flames under control. Dirk Hi.ink, in charge of a fifteen-man outdated
fire-fighting unit (his men pushed two carts--one loaded with coiled
hoses, the other with ladders), was ordered to the German-occupied
Willems Barracks, which had received direct hits from low-flying
Mosquitoes. Although the barracks were blazing, Hi.ink's instructions
from the Arnhem Fire Brigade Headquarters were unusual: let them burn
down, he was told, but protect the surrounding houses. When his unit
arrived, Hi.ink saw that it would have been impossible to save the
barracks in any case. The fires were too far advanced.

From his father's apartment at Willemsplein 28, Gerhardus Gysbers saw
everything around him engulfed in flames. Not only the barracks, but
the nearby high school and the Royal Restaurant, opposite, were
burning. The heat was so intense that Gysbers remembers "the glass in
our windows suddenly became wavy and then melted completely." The
family evacuated the building immediately, scrambling over bricks and
lumber into the square. Gysbers saw Germans stumbling from the blasted
rubble of the barracks with blood pouring from their noses and ears.
Streetcar driver Hendrik Karel reached the Willemsplein
unintentionally. With the electric power cut by the bombing, Karel's
pale-yellow streetcar coasted down a slight incline to reach a stop at
the square. There he found a jumble of other streetcars which, like
his own, had coasted into the square and were unable to leave. Through
the smoke, crowds and debris, Karel saw waiters from the Royal
Restaurant make their escape from the burning building. Abandoning the
few diners who were heading for the doors, the waiters jumped right
through the windows.

At the Municipal Gas Works just southeast of the great Arnhem bridge,
technician Nicolaas Unck admired the skill of the bombardiers. Looking
across the Rhine, he saw that twelve anti-aircraft positions had been
knocked out. Only one gun was left but its barrels were twisted and
bent. Now that the city was without electricity, Unck was faced with
his own problems. The technicians could no longer make gas. After the
fuel remaining in the three huge gasometers was exhausted, there would
be no more. Aside from coal and firewood, Arnhem was now without
electricity, heating or cooking fuels.

Thousands of people remained cloistered in their churches. In the huge
Dutch Reformed "Grote Kerk" Church alone, there were 1,200 people,
Sexton Jan Mijnhart remembers. "Even though we had clearly heard the
bombs exploding outside," he says, "the Reverend Johan Gerritsen had
calmly continued his sermon. When the power was cut off, the organ
stopped. Some one of the congregation came forward and began pumping
the bellows manually." Then, against a background of sirens,
explosions and

thundering planes, the organ pealed out and the entire congregation
stood up to sing the "Wilhelmus," the Dutch national anthem.

In the nearby Calvinist church, near the Arnhem railroad station,
Gijsbert Numan of the resistance listened to a sermon delivered by
Dominee Both. Numan felt that even the intense bombing would not deter
the Germans from carrying out their threat to execute civilian hostages
sometime during the day in reprisal for the resistance's attack on the
viaduct. His conscience bothered him as he listened to Dominee Both's
sermon on "the responsibility for your acts toward God and your fellow
man," and he decided that once the service had ended, he would give
himself up to the Germans. Leaving the church, Numan made his way
through the littered streets to a telephone. There, he called Pieter
Kruyff and told the regional commander his decision. Kruyff was blunt
and to the point. "Rejected," he told Numan. "Carry on with your
work." But Kruyff's was not to be the final decision. Market-Garden
would save the hostages.

In Nijmegen, eleven miles to the south, bombers had hit German
antiaircraft positions with such accuracy that only one was still
firing. The great, towering PGEM power station, supplying electricity
for the entire province of Gelderland, had received only superficial
damage, but high-tension wires were severed, cutting off power
throughout the area. A rayon factory near the PGEM station was badly
damaged and ablaze. Houses in many parts of the city had received
direct hits. Bombs had fallen on a girls' school and a large Catholic
social center. Across the Waal in the village of Lent, a factory was
destroyed and ammunition dumps exploded.

In the city's air-raid command post, the staff worked by candlelight.
The air-raid workers were more and more puzzled by the stream of
reports piling in. Working at his desk in semidarkness, Albertus Uijen
registered the incoming reports and found himself growing more confused
by the moment. The widespread bombings gave no clear picture of what
was happening, except that all German positions on Nijmegen's perimeter
had been attacked.

The principal approaches to the city-- Waalbrug, St. Annastraat and
Groesbeekseweg--were now blocked off. It almost seemed that an effort
had been made to isolate the city.

As in Arnhem, most people in Nijmegen sought shelter from the fighters
continually strafing the streets, but Elias Broekkamp, whose house was
not far from the Waal bridge, had climbed to the roof for a better
look. To Broekkamp's astonishment, so had the personnel of the German
Town Major's office, five houses from Broekkamp's. The Germans,
Broekkamp remembers, "looked very anxious. I looked, obviously, full
of delight. I even remarked that the weather was lovely."

Nurse Johanna Breman watched Germans panic during the strafing. From a
second-floor window of an apartment building south of the Waal bridge,
Nurse Breman looked down at "wounded German soldiers helping each other
along. Some were limping quite badly and I could see many with
bandages. Their tunics were open and most had not even bothered to put
their helmets on. On their heels came German infantrymen. As they
headed toward the bridge, they fired into the windows whenever they saw
Dutch peering out." When the Germans reached the bridge approaches,
they began digging foxholes. "They dug everywhere," Miss Breman
remembers, "next to the street leading up to the bridge, in grassy
areas nearby and beneath trees. I was sure the invasion was coming and
I remember thinking, "What a beautiful view of the battle we shall have
from here." I had a feeling of expectancy." Nurse Breman's
expectations did not include her marriage some months later to Master
Sergeant Charles Mason of the 82nd, who would land in Glider 13 near
the Groesbeek Heights, two miles southwest of her apartment.

Some towns and villages on the edges of the major Market-Garden
objectives suffered damage as severe as the principal targets and had
little, if any, rescue services. Close by the hamlet of Zeelst,
approximately five miles west of Eindhoven, Gerardus de Wit had taken
shelter in a beet field during the bombings. There had been no air
raid alarm. He had seen planes high in the sky, and suddenly bombs
rained down. De Wit, on a visit to his

brother in the village of Veldhoven, four miles south, had turned
around, pulled off the road and dived into a ditch adjoining the field.
Now, he was frantic to get back to his wife and their eleven
children.

Although planes were strafing, De Wit decided to risk the trip.
Raising his head to look across the field, he saw that "even the leaves
were scorched." Leaving his cycle behind, he climbed out of the ditch
and ran across the open field. As he neared the village, he noted that
bombs presumably intended for the Welschap airfield outside Eindhoven
had fallen, instead, directly on little Zeelst. De Wit could see
nothing but ruins. Several houses were burning, others had collapsed;
and people stood about dazed and crying. One of De Wit's
acquaintances, Mrs. Van Helmont, a widow, spotted him and begged him
to come with her to cover a dead boy with a sheet. Tearfully, she
explained that she could not do it herself. The child had been
decapitated, but De Wit recognized the body as a neighbor's son.
Quickly, he covered the corpse. "I didn't look at anything more," he
remembers. "I just tried to get home as quickly as possible." As he
neared his own house, a neighbor who lived opposite tried to detain
him. "I'm bleeding to death," the man called out. "I've been hit by a
bomb splinter."

At that moment, De Wit saw his wife, Adriana, standing in the street
crying. She ran to him. "I thought you'd never get here," she told
him. "Come quickly. Our Tiny has been hit." De Wit went past his
injured neighbor. "I never thought of anything but my son. When I got
to him I saw that the whole of his right side was open and his right
leg was cut almost through. He was still fully conscious and asked for
water. I saw that his right arm was missing. He asked me about his
arm and, to comfort him, I said, "You're lying on it."" As De Wit knelt
by the boy, a doctor arrived. "He told me not to hope anymore," De Wit
remembers, "because our son was going to die." Cradling the boy, De
Wit set out for the Duc George cigar factory, where a Red Cross post
had been set up. Before he reached the factory, his fourteen-year-old
son died in his arms.

In all the terror, confusion and hope, few of the Dutch saw the
vanguard of the Allied Airborne Army. At approximately 12:40 P.m.,
twelve British Stirling bombers swept in over the Arnhem area. At
12:47, four U.s. C-47's appeared over the heaths north of Eindhoven,
while two others flew across the open fields southwest of Nijmegen,
close to the town of Overasselt. In the planes were British and
American pathfinders.

Returning to his farm bordering Renkum heath, less than a mile from
Wolfheze, Jan Pennings saw planes coming from the west, flying low. He
thought they had returned to bomb the railway line. He watched them
warily, ready to dive for cover if bombs dropped. As the planes came
over Renkum heath, the astounded Pennings saw "bundles dropped, and
then parachutists coming out. I knew that in Normandy the Allies had
used parachutists and I was sure this was the beginning of our
invasion."

Minutes later, cycling up to his farm, Jan shouted to his wife, "Come
out! We're free!" Then, the first paratroopers he had ever seen
walked into the farmyard. Dazed and awed, Pennings shook their hands.
Within half an hour, they told him, "hundreds more of us will
arrive."

Chauffeur Jan Peelen too saw the pathfinders land on Renkum heath. He
recalls that "they came down almost silently. They were
well-disciplined and immediately began to peg out the heath." Like
other pathfinders north of the railway line, they were marking out the
landing and dropping zones.

Fifteen miles south, near the town of Overasselt, nineteen-year-old
Theodorus Roelofs, in hiding from the Germans, was suddenly liberated
by 82nd Airborne pathfinders who landed in the vicinity of the family
farm. The Americans, he remembers, were "scouts, and my big fear was
that this small group of braves could easily be done away with." The
pathfinders wasted little time. Discovering that the young Dutchman
spoke English, they quickly enlisted Roelofs to help as guide and
interpreter. Confirming positions on their maps and directing them to
the designated landing sites, Roelofs watched with fascination as the
troopers marked the area with "colored strips and smoke stoves."
Within three

minutes a yellow-paneled O and violet smoke clearly outlined the
area.

The four C-47's carrying the 101/ pathfinders to zones north of
Eindhoven ran into heavy antiaircraft fire. One planeload was shot
down in flames. There were only four survivors. The other three
planes continued on, and the pathfinders dropped accurately on the
101/'s two zones. By 12:54 P.m. dropping and landing zones throughout
the entire Market-Garden area were located and marked. Incredibly, the
Germans still had not raised an alarm.

At Hoenderloo barracks, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Harzer, commander of
the Hohenstaufen Division, toasted newly decorated Captain Paul
Gr@abner. A few minutes before, Harzer had seen a few parachutes fall
to the west of Arnhem. He was not surprised. He thought they were
bailed-out bomber crews. In Oosterbeek, at the Tafelberg Hotel, Field
Marshal Model was having a preluncheon aperitif--a glass of chilled
Moselle--with his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Hans Krebs, the
operations officer Colonel Hans von Tempelhof and the headquarters
adjutant Colonel Leodegard Freyberg. As administrations officer
Lieutenant Gustav Sedelhauser remembers, "Whenever he was at the
headquarters, the Field Marshal was punctual to a fault. We always sat
down to luncheon at precisely 1300 hours." That time was H Hour for
the Market forces.

Now, in tight formations, the great procession of C-47's carrying the
101/ Airborne thundered across Allied-held Belgium. Some twenty-five
miles beyond Brussels, the serials swung north heading for the Dutch
border. Then, men in the planes looked down and, for the first time,
saw their earthbound counterpart, the Garden forces whose ground attack
was to be synchronized with the air assault. It was a spectacular,
unforgettable sight. The vast panoply of General Horrocks' XXX Corps
spread out over every field, trail and road. Massed columns of tanks,
half-tracks, armored cars and personnel carriers and line after line of
guns stood poised for the breakout. On tank antennas pennants
fluttered in the wind, and thousands of Britishers standing on vehicles
and crowding the fields waved up to the men of the airborne. Orange
smoke billowing into the air marked the British front line. Beyond was
the enemy.

Skimming the ground, fighter-bombers led the way to the drop zones,
attempting to clear everything ahead of the formations. Even though
the intense bombing that preceded the airborne assault had leveled many
antiaircraft batteries, camouflaged nettings suddenly swung back to
reveal hidden enemy positions. Some men remember seeing the tops of
haystacks open to disclose nests of 88 and 20 mm. guns. Despite the
thoroughness of the fighter-plane attacks, it was impossible to silence
all enemy opposition. Just seven minutes away from their drop zones
north of Eindhoven, the men of the 101/ ran into intense flak.

Pfc. John Cipolla was dozing when he was suddenly awak-

ened by "the sharp crack of antiaircraft guns, and shrapnel ripped
through our plane." Like everyone else, Cipolla was so weighted down
by equipment that he could hardly move. Besides his rifle, knapsack,
raincoat and blanket, he had ammunition belts draping his shoulders,
pockets full of hand grenades, rations and his main parachute plus
reserve. In addition, in his plane, each man carried a land mine. As
he recalls, "a C-47 on our left flank burst into flames, then another,
and I thought "My God, we are next! How will I ever get out of this
plane!""

His C-47 was shuddering and everyone seemed to be yelling at the same
time, "Let's get out! We've been hit!" The jumpmaster gave the order
to "Stand up and hook up." Then he calmly began an equipment check.
Cipolla could hear the men as they called out, "One O.k. Two O.k. Three
O.k." It seemed hours before Cipolla, the last man of the stick, was
able to shout, "Twenty-one O.k." Then the green light went on and, in
a rush, the men were out and falling, parachutes blossoming above them.
Looking up to check his canopy, Cipolla saw that the C-47 he had just
left was blazing. As he watched, the plane went down in flames.

Despite the bursting shells that engulfed the planes, the formations
did not waver. The pilots of the IX Troop Carrier Command held to
their courses without deviating. Second Lieutenant Robert O'Connell
remembers that his formation flew so tight, "I thought our pilot was
going to stick his wing into the ear of the pilot flying on our left."
O'Connell's plane was on fire. The red prejump warning light was on,
and "so much smoke was fogging the aisle that I could not see back to
the end of my stick." Men were coughing and yelling to get out.
O'Connell "braced himself against the door to keep them in." The
pilots flew on steadily, without taking evasive action, and O'Connell
saw that the formation was gradually losing altitude and slowing down,
preparatory to the jump. O'Connell hoped that "if the pilot thought
the ship was going down, he would give us the green in time for the
troops to get out." Calmly, the pilot held his flaming plane on course
until he was right over the drop zone. Then the green light went

on and O'Connell and his men jumped safely. O'Connell learned later
that the plane crash-landed but the crew survived.

In total disregard for their own safety, troop-carrier pilots brought
their planes through the flak and over the drop zones. "Don't worry
about me," Second Lieutenant Herbert E. Shulman, the pilot of one
burning C-47, radioed his flight commander. "I'm going to drop these
troops right on the DZ." He did. Paratroopers left the plane safely.
Moments later, it crashed in flames. Staff Sergeant Charles A.
Mitchell watched in horror as the plane to his left streamed flame from
its port engine. As the pilot held it steady on course, Mitchell saw
the entire stick of paratroopers jump right through the fire.

Tragedies did not end there. Pfc. Paul Johnson was forward next to
the pilot's cabin when his plane was hit dead center and both fuel
tanks caught fire. Of the sixteen paratroopers, pilot and copilot,
only Johnson and two other troopers got out. They had to climb over
the dead in the plane to make their jumps. Each survivor was badly
burned and Johnson's hair was completely seared away. The three came
down in a German tank-bivouac area. For half an hour they fought off
the enemy from a ditch. Then, all three injured, they were overwhelmed
and taken prisoner.

Just as the green light went on in another plane, the lead paratrooper,
standing in the door, was killed. He fell back on Corporal John
Altomare. His body was quickly moved aside and the rest of the group
jumped. And, as another stick of troopers floated to the ground, a
C-47 out of control hit two of them, its propellers chopping them to
pieces.

Typically, the Americans found humor even in the terrifying approach to
the drop zones. Just after Captain Cecil Lee stood to hook up, his
plane was hit. Shrapnel ripped a hole through the seat he had just
vacated. Nearby, a trooper shouted disgustedly, "Now they give us a
latrine!" In another plane, Second Lieutenant Anthony Borrelli was
sure he was paralyzed. The red light went on and everyone hooked
up--except Borrelli, who couldn't move. An officer for only two weeks
and on his first combat mission, Borrelli, who was Number 1 in the
stick, was conscious

of all eyes on him. To his embarrassment, he discovered he had hooked
his belt to the seat. Private Robert Boyce made the trip despite the
good intentions of the division dentist, who had marked him "L.o.b."
(left Out of Battle) because of his dental problems. With the
intervention of his company commander, Boyce, a Normandy veteran, was
permitted to go. Besides a bad tooth, he had other worries. Several
new paratroop innovations-- leg packs for machine guns, quick-release
harness on some chutes and combat instead of jump boots-- made him and
many other men nervous. In particular, the troopers were concerned
that their shroud lines might catch on the buckles of their new combat
boots. As his plane flew low in its approach, Boyce saw Dutch
civilians below holding up two fingers in the V-for-victory salute.
That was all Boyce needed. "Hey, look," he called to the others,
"they're giving us two to one we don't make it."

The odds against their ever reaching their drop zones seemed at least
that high to many. Colonel Robert F. Sink, commander of the 506th
Regiment, saw "a tremendous volume of flak coming up to greet us." As
he was looking out the door, the plane shuddered violently and Sink saw
a part of the wing tear and dangle. He turned to the men in his stick
and said, "Well, there goes the wing." To Sink's relief, "nobody
seemed to think much about it. They figured by this time we were
practically in."

In plane Number 2, Sink's executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles
Chase, saw that their left wing was afire. Captain Thomas Mulvey
remembers that Chase stared at it for a minute and then remarked
mildly, "I guess they're catching up on us. We'd better go." As the
green light went on in both planes, the men jumped safely. The plane
in which Chase was traveling burned on the ground. Sink's plane, with
its damaged wing, is thought to have made the journey back to England
safely.

Similar intense flak engulfed the serials of the 502nd Regiment, and
planes of two groups almost collided. One serial, slightly off course,
strayed into the path of a second group, causing the latter to climb
for altitude and its troopers to make a higher jump than had been
planned. In the lead plane of one of the serials was the

division commander, General Maxwell D. Taylor, and the 502nd's 1/
Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Cassidy. Standing in
the doorway, Cassidy saw one of the planes in the group burst into
flames. He counted only seven parachutes. Then fire broke out in
another C-47 just off to the left. All the paratroopers jumped from
it. Mesmerized by the blazing plane, Cassidy failed to notice that the
green light was on. General Taylor, standing behind him, said quietly,
"Cassidy, the light's on." Automatically Cassidy answered, "Yes, sir.
I know it," and jumped. Taylor was right behind him.

To General Taylor, the 101/ jump was "unusually successful; almost like
an exercise." In the initial planning, Taylor's staff had anticipated
casualties as high as 30 percent. Of the 6,695 paratroopers who
enplaned in England, 6,669 actually jumped. Despite the intense flak,
the bravery of the C-47 and fighter pilots gave the 101/ an almost
perfect jump. Although some units were dropped from one to three miles
north of the drop zones, they landed so close together that assembly
was quick. Only two planes failed to reach the drop zone, and the IX
Troop Carrier Command took the brunt of all casualties by their heroic
determination to get the troopers to their targets. Of the 424 C-47's
carrying the 101/, every fourth plane was damaged, and sixteen went
down, killing their crews.

Glider losses were heavy, too. Later, as these serials began to come
in, only 53 of the original 70 would arrive without mishap on the
landing zone near Son. Still, despite abortions, enemy flak and
crash-landings, the gliders would eventually deliver nearly 80 percent
of the men and 75 percent of the jeeps and trailers they carried. *
Now, Taylor's Screaming Eagles began to move on their * Because
Market-Garden was considered an all-British operation, few American
correspondents were accredited to cover the attack. None was at
Arnhem. One of the Americans attached to the 101/ was a United Press
reporter named Walter Cronkite, who landed by glider. Cronkite recalls
that "I thought the wheels of the glider were for landing. Imagine my
surprise when we skidded along the ground and the wheels came up
through the floor. I got another shock. Our helmets, which we all
swore were hooked, came flying off on impact and seemed more dangerous
than the incoming shells. After landing I grabbed the first helmet I
saw, my trusty musette bag with the Olivetti typewriter inside and
began crawling toward the canal which was the rendezvous point. When I
looked back, I found a half dozen guys crawling after me. It seems
that I had grabbed the wrong helmet. The one I wore had two neat
stripes down the back indicating that I was a lieutenant."

objectives--the bridges and crossings over the vital fifteen-mile
stretch of corridor ahead of the British ground forces.

Colonel General Kurt Student and his chief of staff, Colonel Reinhard,
stood on the balcony of the General's cottage near Vught and "simply
stared, stunned, like fools." Student remembers clearly that
"everywhere we looked, we saw chains of planes --fighters, troop
carriers and cargo planes-- flying over us. We climbed onto the roof
of the house to get a better idea of just where these units were
going." Streams of planes seemed to be heading in the direction of
Grave and Nijmegen and, only a few miles to the south near Eindhoven
and Son, he could clearly see troop carriers-- one after the
other--coming in and dropping paratroopers and equipment. Some
aircraft flew so low that Student and Reinhard instinctively ducked.
"On the grounds of the headquarters, our clerks, quartermasters,
drivers and signalmen were out in the open, firing with all sorts of
weapons. As usual, there was no sign of our own fighter planes."
Student was completely baffled. "I could not tell what was happening
or where these airborne units were going. In these moments, I never
once thought of the danger of our own position." But Student, the
paratroop expert, was filled with admiration and envy. "This mighty
spectacle deeply impressed me. I thought with reflection and longing
of our own airborne operations and I said to Reinhard, "Oh, if ever I'd
had such means at my disposal. Just once, to have this many planes!""
Rein-

hard's feelings were very much in the present. "Herr General," he told
Student, "we've got to do something!" They left the roof and went back
to Student's office.

Only the previous evening, Student, in his daily report, had warned,
"Heavy columns of traffic south of the Maas-Schelde Canal indicate an
impending attack." The problem was: had it already begun? If so, then
these airborne units were after the bridges around Eindhoven, Grave and
Nijmegen. All the spans were prepared for demolition and protected by
special engineer parties and security detachments. A bridge commander
had been assigned to each crossing with strict orders to destroy the
bridge in case of attack. "The obvious move for the Allies," it
occurred to Student, "was to use airborne troops in this situation to
seize the bridges before we could destroy them." At this time, Student
did not even think of the importance of the Lower Rhine bridge at
Arnhem. "Get me Model," he told Reinhard.

Reinhard picked up the phone to discover that the telephone lines were
out. The headquarters was already cut off.

In Oosterbeek, some thirty-seven miles away, at the Tafelberg Hotel,
Lieutenant Gustav Sedelhauser, Model's administration officer, was
angry. "Are you hung over from last night?" he shouted into a field
phone. Unteroffizier Youppinger, one of the 250-man company which,
under Sedelhauser, was assigned to protect Model, repeated what he had
said. At Wolfheze, "gliders are landing in our laps," he insisted.
Sedelhauser slammed down the phone and rushed into the operations
office, where he reported the message to a startled lieutenant colonel.
Together, they hurried to the dining room, where Model and his chief
of staff General Krebs were at lunch. "I've just had news that gliders
are landing at Wolfheze," the colonel said. The operations officer,
Colonel Tempelhof, stared; the monocle fell out of Krebs's eye. "Well,
now we're for it," Tempelhof said.

Model jumped to his feet and issued a flurry of orders to evacu-

ate the headquarters. As he headed out of the dining room to collect
his own belongings, he shouted back over his shoulder, "They're after
me and this headquarters!" Moments later, carrying only a small case,
Model rushed through the Tafelberg's entrance. On the sidewalk he
dropped the case, which flew open, spilling his linens and toilet
articles.

Krebs followed Model outside in such haste that, Sedelhauser saw, "he
had even forgotten his cap, pistol and belt." Tempelhof had not even
had time to remove the war maps in the operations office. Colonel
Freyberg, the headquarters adjutant, was equally rushed. As he passed
Sedelhauser, he shouted, "Don't forget my cigars." At his car, Model
told his driver, Frombeck, "Quick! Doetinchem! Bittrich's
headquarters!"

Sedelhauser waited until the car drove off and then returned to the
hotel. In the operations office, he saw the war maps--showing
positions all the way from Holland to Switzerland --still on a table.
He rolled them up and took them with him. Then he ordered the
Hartenstein Hotel and the Tafelberg immediately evacuated; all
transport, he said, "every car, truck and motorbike, is to leave here
immediately." The last report he received before leaving for
Doetinchem was that the British were less than two miles away. In all
the confusion he completely forgot Freyberg's cigars.

Surrounded by ground haze and the smoke and fire of burning buildings,
the mighty British glider fleet was landing. Already the areas marked
by orange and crimson nylon strips were beginning

to look like vast aircraft parking lots. Blue smoke eddied up from the
two landing zones-- "Reyers Camp Farm" to the north and "Renkum Heath"
to the southwest--near Wolfheze. From these zones, in chain after
chain, tugs and gliders stretched back almost twenty miles to their
approach point near the town of s'Hertogenbosch, southwest of Nijmegen.
Swarms of fighters protected these ponderous columns. Traffic was so
dense that pilots were reminded of the rush-hour congestion around
London's busy Piccadilly Circus.

The serials--each group separated from the next by a four-minute
interval--flew slowly over the flat, water-veined Dutch countryside.
The landmarks pilots had been briefed to recognize now began to pass
beneath them: the great wide rivers Maas and Waal and up ahead, the
Lower Rhine. Then, as each formation began its descent, men saw Arnhem
off to the right and their vital objectives: the rail and highway
bridges. Incredibly, despite the R.a.f. prediction of intense
antiaircraft fire, the immense glider cavalcade encountered virtually
no resistance. The preassault bombings had been far more effective
around Arnhem than in the Eindhoven area. Not a single tug or glider
was shot down in making the approach.

With clocklike precision, the skilled pilots of the R.a.f. and the
Glider Pilot Regiment came over the zones. As gliders cast off, their
tugs made climbing turns to free air space for the combinations coming
up behind. These intricate maneuvers and the heavy traffic were
causing problems of their own. Sergeant Pilot Bryan Tomblin remembers
chaotic congestion over the landing zones. "There were gliders, tugs,
ropes and all sorts of things in the sky," he recalls. "You had to be
on the lookout all the time."

Staff Sergeant Victor Miller, piloting a Horsa, recalls coming in over
the Lower Rhine and finding it "unbelievably calm." Beyond, he
suddenly spotted his landing zone, with its "triangular-shaped woods
and little farm nestling in the far corner." Seconds later, Miller
heard the voice of his Stirling tug's navigator. "O.k. Number 2. When
you're ready." Miller acknowledged. "Good luck, Number 2," the
navigator told him. Miller immediately cast

off. His tug disappeared, the tow rope flapping in its wake. It would
be dropped, Miller knew, "on the enemy as a parting gift before the
Stirling turned onto its homeward course."

The glider's air speed fell off and the field loomed nearer. Miller
called for half-flaps and his copilot, Sergeant Tom Hollingsworth,
instantly pushed a lever. For a moment the glider bucked, "as the
great flaps descending from underneath each wing braked against our
speed." The landing zone, Miller estimated, was now less than a mile
away. "I reminded Tom to look out for gliders on his side. One slid
across and above us less than fifty yards away," and, to Miller's
amazement, "swung in on the same course. Another glider seemed to be
drifting into us from starboard. I don't think the pilot even saw us,
he was so intent on getting down in the field." To avoid collision,
Miller deliberately dived under the incoming glider. "A great black
shape flashed over our cockpit, too close for my liking. I was
concentrating so hard to set down in one piece that I never wondered if
the enemy was firing at us--not that we could have done much about
it."

Miller continued his descent with "tree tops leaping toward our floor
boards and past the wings. As the ground rushed up, another glider
came alongside. I pulled back on the wheel, leveled, we hit once,
bounced about three feet, and came down to stay. Tom had slammed on
the brakes and we careened across the plowed field. Then the wheels
sank into soft soil and we ground to a halt fifty yards short of a
heavy-looking line of trees." In the silence, after the continuous
deafening roar of the slip stream, Miller heard the distant crackle of
small-arms fire, "but my one thought was to get out of the glider
before another crashed or landed on us. I was the last man out. I
didn't even pause, but jumped straight through the ramp door and hit
the ground of Holland, four feet below, rather hard."

The glider in which Signalman Graham Marples was riding circled and
came back over its landing zone because of the congestion. "But, by
then, we had run out of wind," Marples remembers. "I saw trees coming
through the glider floor. They just ripped the floor to pieces, and
the next thing I knew, we

nosed over and came down. I could hear everything breaking, like dry
twigs snapping. We landed squarely on our nose but no one was hurt
except for a few scratches and bruises." Later, the pilot told Marples
he had pulled up to avoid collision with another glider.

Many gliders, having surmounted all the problems of the long trip,
touched down to disaster. Staff Sergeant George Davis stood near his
empty Horsa and watched other gliders come in. One of the first to
land, Davis had brought in thirty-two men of the 1/ Airlanding Brigade.
He saw two gliders "almost side by side bump across the landing zone
and into the trees. The wings of both were sheared off." Seconds
later, another Horsa rumbled in. Its speed was such that Davis knew it
would never be able to stop in time. The glider plowed into the trees.
No one got out. With his copilot, Staff Sergeant Williams, Davis ran
to the glider and looked into the plexiglass-covered cockpit. Everyone
inside was dead. A 75 mm. howitzer had broken from its chain mooring,
crushing the gun crew and decapitating the pilot and copilot.

Lieutenant Michael Dauncey had just landed his glider--carrying a jeep,
trailer and six gunners from an artillery battery--when he saw a huge
eight-ton Hamilcar touch down. "The field was soft," he recalls, "and
I saw the nose of the Hamilcar digging up earth in front of it."
Weight and ground speed drove it deeper until the huge tail rose up in
the air and the Hamilcar flipped over on its back. Dauncey knew "it
was useless to try to dig them out. A Horsa's flat on top but a
Hamilcar's got a hump where the pilots sit, and we knew the pilots were
finished."

Making his approach in another Hamilcar, Staff Sergeant Gordon Jenks
saw the same crash and immediately deduced that the ground ahead was
too soft. Instantly, he decided against landing in the field. "I
reckoned if we went into a dive right then," he remembers, "we would
have enough speed for me to hold her off the deck until we had cleared
the fence and got safely into the next field." Jenks pushed the
control column forward, dived, then leveled out a few feet above the
ground. Easing the huge aircraft

gently over the fence, Jenks "put her down in the far field as lightly
as a feather."

All over the landing zones now the tails of gliders were being unbolted
and swung back, and artillery pieces, equipment, stores, jeeps and
trailers were being unloaded. The men in Lance Corporal Henry Brook's
glider, like many others, found that the unloading maneuver was fine in
theory but more difficult in practice. "There were eight pins with a
protective wire holding the glider tail on," Brook explained. "Back in
England in practice exercises, you could always get the tail off and
jeep and trailer out in two minutes flat. In action, it was different.
We cut the wire and got the pins out but the tail wouldn't budge."
Brook and the other troopers finally chopped it off. Lance Bombardier
J. W. Crook was similarly frustrated, but a nearby jeep came to the aid
of his men and, with its hawser, yanked off the tail.

All over the two zones men were beginning to salvage cargo from wrecked
gliders. The crash of two giant Hamilcars was a serious loss. They
contained a pair of 17-pound artillery pieces plus three-ton trucks and
ammunition trailers. But all of the fifteen 75 mm. pack howitzers of
the 1/ Airlanding Light Regiment artillery arrived safely.

Most men who came in by glider recall a strange, almost eerie silence
immediately after landing. Then, from the assembly point, men heard
the skirl of bagpipes playing "Blue Bonnets." At about the same time,
soldiers on the edge of Renkum Heath saw Dutch civilians wandering
aimlessly through the woods or hiding in fright. Lieutenant Neville
Hay of the Phantom unit remembers that "it was a sobering sight. Some
were in white hospital gowns and seemed to be herded along by
attendants. Men and women capered about, waving, laughing and
jabbering. They were obviously quite mad." Glider Pilot Victor Miller
was startled by voices in the woods. Then, "groups of weird
white-clothed men and women filed past." It was only later that the
troopers learned the strangely behaved civilians were inmates from the
bombed Wolfheze Psychiatric Institute.

General Urquhart had landed at Renkum Heath. He too was struck by the
stillness. "It was," he recalls, "incredibly quiet. Unreal." While
his chief of staff, Colonel Charles Mackenzie, set up the division's
tactical headquarters at the edge of the woods, Urquhart headed for the
parachute dropping zones, four hundred yards away. It was nearly time
for Brigadier Lathbury's 1/ Parachute Brigade to arrive. From the
distance came the drone of approaching aircraft. The bustle and
activity all over the glider zones paused as men looked up to see the
long lines and C-47's. Small-arms and antiaircraft fire during the
paratroop drop was as limited and spasmodic as during the glider
landings. At exactly 1:53 P.m., and for the next fifteen minutes, the
sky was filled with brilliant-colored parachutes as the 1/ Brigade
began jumping. Some 650 parapacks with bright-yellow, red and brown
chutes--carrying guns, ammunition and equipment--fell rapidly through
the streams of troopers. Other supply chutes, pushed out of the planes
before the men jumped, floated down with a variety of cargo, including
miniature foldable motorcycles. Many already overburdened paratroopers
also jumped with large kitbags. In theory, these were to be lowered by
a cord just before the men touched ground. Scores of the packs broke
away from troopers and smashed on the zones. Several contained
precious radio sets.

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.

As if on signal, German guns opened up as the planes carrying the 82nd
Airborne Division made their approach to the drop zones. Looking down,
Brigadier General James M. Gavin saw ground fire spurting from a line
of trenches paralleling the Maas-Waal

Canal. In wooded areas, enemy batteries that had remained silent and
hidden until now also began to fire. Watching, Gavin wondered if his
battle plan for the 82nd, which had been based on a calculated risk,
might founder.

Charged with holding the middle sector of the Market-Garden corridor,
the division had widespread objectives, running ten miles
south-to-north and twelve miles west-to-east. Besides the drop of one
paratroop company near the western end of the Grave bridge, which was
to be seized by a surprise coup de main assault, Gavin had chosen three
drop areas and one large landing zone. The latter would accommodate
his fifty Waco gliders and the thirty-eight Horsas and Wacos of General
Frederick Browning's British I Airborne Corps headquarters. But Gavin
had ordered only one drop zone, north of Overasselt, to be marked by
pathfinders. The other three, lying close to the Groesbeek ridge and
the German border, were deliberately left unmarked. Gavin's
paratroopers and gliders would land without identifying beacons or
smoke in order to confuse the enemy as to their touchdown areas. Some
thirteen minutes after the 82nd was down, Browning's Corps headquarters
would land.

Because Gavin's primary concern was that enemy tanks might suddenly
emerge from the Reichswald along the German border east of his largest
glider and drop zone, he had given two unusual orders. To protect both
his division and Browning's headquarters, he had instructed
paratroopers to jump close to any antiaircraft batteries they were able
to spot from the air and render them useless as quickly as possible.
And, for the first time in airborne history, he was parachuting in a
complete battalion of field artillery, dropping it onto the large zone
directly facing the forest and approximately one and one-half miles
from the German border itself. Now, looking at the intense
antiaircraft fire and thinking of the possibility of enemy tanks in the
Reichswald, Gavin knew that while he had planned for nearly all
eventualities, the men of the 82nd faced a tough task.

Gavin's Normandy veterans had never forgotten the slaughter of their
own in Ste. M`ere @eglise. Dropped by accident on that village, men
had been machine-gunned by the Germans as they came down; many were
killed as they hung helpless in their parachutes, from telephone lines
and trees around the village square. Not until Ste. M`ere @eglise was
finally secured by Lieutenant Colonel Ben Vandervoort were the dead
troopers cut down and buried. Now, as the 82nd prepared to jump over
Holland, some men called out to troopers still hooked up behind them:
"Remember Ste. M`ere @eglise." Although it was a risky procedure,
many troopers jumped with their guns blazing.

Captain Briand Beaudin, coming down over his drop zone near the
Groesbeek Ridge, saw that he was descending directly over a German
antiaircraft emplacement with guns aiming at him. Beaudin began firing
with his Colt .45. "Suddenly I realized," Beaudin remembers, "how
futile it was, aiming my little peashooter while oscillating in the air
above large-caliber guns." Landing close to the flak site, Beaudin
took the entire crew prisoner. He thinks the Germans "were so startled
they couldn't fire a single shot."

First Lieutenant James J. Coyle thought he was heading for a landing on
a German tent hospital. Suddenly, enemy troops poured out of the tent
and began running for 20 mm. antiaircraft guns around the perimeter.
He, too, worked his .45 from its holster but his parachute began to
oscillate and Coyle drifted away from the tent. One of the Germans
started to run in Coyle's direction. "I couldn't get off a shot at the
Kraut," Coyle recalls. "One second I'd be pointing the pistol at the
ground; the next, I'd be aiming at the sky. I did have enough sense
left to put the Colt back into the holster so I wouldn't drop it or
shoot myself when I hit." On the ground, even before he tried to get
out of his harness, Coyle drew his pistol once more. "The Kraut was
now only a few feet away, but he was acting as though he didn't know I
existed. Suddenly I realized that he wasn't running toward me; he was
just running away." As the German hurried past Coyle he threw away his
gun and helmet, and Coyle could see "he was only a kid, about eighteen
years old. I just couldn't shoot an unarmed man. The last I saw of
the boy he was running for the German border."

When tracer bullets began ripping through his canopy, Private Edwin C.
Raub became so enraged that he deliberately side-slipped his chute so
as to land next to the antiaircraft gun. Without removing his harness,
and dragging his parachute behind him, Raub rushed the Germans with his
Tommy gun. He killed one, captured the others and then, with plastic
explosives, destroyed the flak-gun barrels.

Although enemy opposition to the 505th and 508th regiments in the
Groesbeek area was officially considered negligible, a considerable
amount of antiaircraft and small-arms fire came from the woods
surrounding the zones. Without waiting to assemble, 82nd troopers,
individually and in small groups, swarmed over these pockets of
resistance, quickly subduing them and taking prisoners.
Simultaneously, fighter planes skimmed over the tree tops,
machine-gunning the enemy emplacements. The Germans scored heavily
against these low-level attacks. Within a matter of minutes, three
fighters were hit and crashed near the woods. Staff Sergeant Michael
Vuletich saw one of them. It cartwheeled across the drop zone and when
it finally stopped, only the plane's fuselage was intact. Moments
later, the pilot emerged unscathed and stopped by the wreckage to light
a cigarette. Vuletich remembers that the downed flier remained with
the company as an infantryman.

From the ground, Staff Sergeant James Jones saw a P-47 aflame at about
1,500 feet. He expected the pilot to bail out but the plane came down,
skidded across the drop zone and broke apart. The tail snapped off,
the motor rolled away, and the cockpit came to rest on the field.
Jones was sure the pilot was dead but, as he watched, the canopy slid
back and "a little tow-headed guy with no hat on and a .45 under his
arm ran toward us." Jones remembers asking, "Man, why in the devil
didn't you jump?" The pilot grinned. "Hell, I was afraid to," he told
Jones.

Just after landing and assembling his gear, Staff Sergeant Russell
O'ationeal watched a P-51 fighter dive and strafe a hidden German
position near his field. After the plane had made two passes over the
machine-gun nest, it was hit; but the pilot was able to circle and make
a safe belly landing. According to O'ationeal, "this guy jumped out
and ran up to me, shouting, "Give me a gun, quick! I know right where
that Kraut sddo.b. is and I'm gonna get him."" As O'ationeal stared
after him, the pilot grabbed a gun and raced off toward the woods.

Within eighteen minutes, 4,511 men of the 82nd's 505th and 508th
regiments, along with engineers and seventy tons of equipment, were
down on or near their drop zones straddling the town of Groesbeek on
the eastern side of the wooded heights. As the men assembled, cleared
the zones and struck out for objectives, special pathfinder teams
marked the areas for the artillery drop, the 82nd's glider force, and
the British Corps headquarters. So far, General Gavin's calculated
risk was succeeding. Yet, although radio contact between the regiments
was established almost immediately, it was still too early for Gavin,
who had jumped with the 505th, to learn what was occurring eight miles
west, where the 504th Regiment had dropped north of Overasselt. Nor
did he know whether the special assault against the Grave bridge was
proceeding according to plan.

Like the rest of the division's planes, the 137 C-47's carrying Colonel
Reuben H. Tucker's 504th Regiment ran into spasmodic antiaircraft fire
as they neared the Overasselt drop zone. As in the other areas, pilots
held their courses, and at 1:15 P.m., some 2,016 men began to jump.
Eleven planes swung slightly west and headed for a small drop site near
the vital nine-span, 1,500-foot-long bridge over the Maas river near
Grave. These C-47's carried Company E of Major Edward Wellems' 2nd
Battalion to the most crucial of the 82nd's immediate objectives.
Their job was to rush the bridges from the western approach; the
remainder of Wellems' battalion would strike out from Overasselt and
head for the eastern side. If the Grave bridge was not taken quickly
and intact, the tight Market-Garden schedule could not be maintained.
Loss of the bridge might mean failure for the entire operation.

As E Company's planes headed for the western assault site, platoon
leader Lieutenant John S. Thompson could clearly see the Maas river,
the town of Grave, the mass jump of the 504th to his right near
Overasselt and then, coming up, the ditch-lined fields where the
company was to drop. As Thompson watched, other men from the company
were already out of their planes and falling toward the Grave bridge
zone; but in the lieutenant's C-47 the green light had not yet flashed
on. When it did, Thompson saw that they were directly over some
buildings. He waited for a few seconds, saw fields beyond and jumped
with his platoon. By a fortuitous error, he and his men came down only
some five or six hundred yards from the southwestern edge of the
bridge.

Thompson could hear erratic firing from the direction of Grave itself,
but around the bridge everything seemed quiet. He did not know whether
he should wait until the remainder of the company came up or attack
with the sixteen men in his platoon. "Since this was our primary
mission, I decided to attack," Thompson says. Sending Corporal Hugh H.
Perry back to the company commander, Thompson gave him a laconic
message to deliver: "We are proceeding toward the bridge."

Firing from the town and nearby buildings was now more intense, and
Thompson led the platoon to cover in nearby drainage ditches. Working
their way toward the bridge, men waded in water up to their necks.
They began to receive fire from a flak tower close to the bridge and
Thompson noticed enemy soldiers with bags in their arms running to and
from a building near the crossing. He thought it must be a maintenance
or power plant. Fearful that the Germans were carrying demolition
charges to the bridge in preparation for destroying it, Thompson
quickly deployed his men, encircled the building and opened fire. "We
raked the area with machine guns, overran the power plant, found four
dead Germans and one wounded," Thompson recalls. "Apparently they had
been carrying their personal equipment and blankets."

Suddenly, two trucks came racing down the highway from Grave, heading
toward the bridge. One of Thompson's men killed a driver whose truck
careened off the road as its load of German

soldiers scrambled to get out. The second vehicle stopped immediately
and the soldiers in it jumped to the ground. Thompson's men opened up,
but the Germans showed no desire to fight. Without returning fire,
they ran away.

Fire was still coming from the flak tower, but by now it was passing
over the heads of the platoon. "The gunners were unable to depress the
20 mm. flak gun sufficiently to get us," Thompson remembers. The
platoon's bazooka man, Private Robert McGraw, crawled forward and, at a
range of about seventy-five yards, fired three rounds, two of them into
the top of the tower, and the gun ceased firing.

Although a twin 20 mm. gun in a tower across the river near the far
end of the bridge was firing, Thompson and his men nonetheless
destroyed electrical equipment and cables that they suspected were
hooked up to demolitions. The platoon then set up a roadblock and
placed land mines across the highway at the southwestern approach to
the bridge. In the flak tower they had knocked out, they found the
gunner dead but his 20 mm. weapon undamaged. Thompson's men promptly
began firing it at the flak tower across the river. The platoon, he
knew, would soon be reinforced by the rest of E Company coming up
behind and, shortly after, by Major Wellems' battalion even now rushing
from Overasselt to grab the northeastern end of the bridge. But, as
far as Lieutenant Thompson was concerned, the prime objective was
already taken. * * The 82nd's after-action report and that of the
504th commander, Colonel Tucker, state the bridge was "taken" at 2:30
P.m. But Major Wellems' account states that because the bridge was
still under harassing fire, the first men to actually cross from the
northeastern end went over at 3:35 P.m. Still, the E Company platoon
under Lieutenant Thompson held the bridge and prevented its demolition
from 1:45 P.m. until it was described as "secure" at 5 P.m.

By now, the remaining battalions of Tucker's 504th Regiment were moving
eastward, like spokes on a wheel, for the three road crossings and the
railroad bridge over the Maas-Waal Canal. Rushing toward the bridge
also were units of the 505th and 508th regiments, bent on seizing the
crossings from the opposite ends. Not all these objectives were
essential to the Market-Garden

advance. In the surprise of the assault and the ensuing confusion,
Gavin hoped to seize them all; but one, in addition to the
all-important Grave bridge, would suffice.

To keep the enemy off balance, defend his positions, protect General
Browning's Corps headquarters and aid his paratroopers as they moved on
their objectives, Gavin was depending heavily on his howitzers; and now
the guns of the 376th Parachute Field Artillery were coming in. Small
artillery units had been dropped in previous operations, but they had
been badly scattered and slow to assemble and fire. The unit of 544
men now approaching was hand-picked, every soldier a veteran
paratrooper. Among the forty-eight planes carrying the battalion was
the artillery--twelve 75 mm. howitzers, each broken down into seven
pieces. The howitzers would be dropped first, followed by some 700
rounds of ammunition. Lining up, the C-47's came in and, in quick
succession, the guns rolled out. Ammunition and men followed, all
making a near-perfect landing.

One accident caused scarcely a pause. Lieutenant Colonel Wilbur
Griffith, commanding the 376th, broke his ankle on the jump but his men
quickly liberated a Dutch wheelbarrow in which to carry him. "I shall
never forget the Colonel being trundled from place to place," Major
Augustin Hart recalls, "and barking out orders for everybody to get
assembled at top speed." When the job was complete, Griffith was
wheeled over to General Gavin. There he reported: "Guns in position,
sir, and ready to fire on call." In just over an hour, in the most
successful drop of its kind ever made, the entire battalion was
assembled and ten of its howitzers were already firing.

Fourteen minutes after the 82nd's field artillery landed, Waco gliders
carrying an airborne antitank battalion, engineers, elements of
Division headquarters, guns, ammunition, trailers and jeeps began to
come in. Of the original fifty gliders leaving England, all but four
reached Holland. Not all, however, touched down on their landing zone.
Some gliders ended up a mile or two away. One, copiloted by Captain
Anthony Jedrziewski, cut loose late from its tug and Jedrziewski saw
with horror that "we were

heading straight for Germany on a one-glider invasion." The pilot made
a 180-degree turn and began to look for a place to land. As they came
in, Jedrziewski remembers, "we lost one wing on a haystack, the other
on a fence and ended up with the glider nose in the ground. Seeing
earth up to my knees, I wasn't sure if my feet were still a part of me.
Then, we heard the unwelcome sound of an 88 and, in nothing flat, we
had the jeep out and were racing back toward our own area."

They were luckier than Captain John Connelly, whose pilot was killed
during the approach. Connelly, who had never flown a glider before,
took the controls and landed the Waco just inside the German border,
six to seven miles away, near the town of Wyler. Only Connelly and one
other man escaped capture. They were to hide out until darkness and
finally reached their units by midmorning of September 18.

Yet, in all, the 82nd Airborne had successfully brought in 7,467
paratroopers and glider-borne men. The last elements to touch down in
the area were 35 Horsas and Wacos carrying General Frederick Browning's
Corps headquarters. Three gliders had been lost en route to the drop
zone, two before reaching the Continent; the third, south of Vught, had
crash-landed in the vicinity of General Student's headquarters.
Browning's headquarters landed almost on the German frontier. "There
was little flak, if any, and almost no enemy opposition," Browning's
chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, remembers. "We set down about
a hundred yards west of the Reichswald Forest and my glider was roughly
fifty yards away from Browning's."

Colonel George S. Chatterton, commanding the Glider Pilot Regiment, was
at the controls of Browning's Horsa. After clipping off a front wheel
on an electric cable, Chatterton slid into a cabbage patch. "We got
out," Chatterton recalls, "and Browning, looking around, said, "By God,
we're here, George!"" Nearby, Brigadier Walch saw Browning run across
the landing zone toward the Reichswald. When he returned a few minutes
later, he explained to Walch, "I wanted to be the first British officer
to pee in Germany."

While Browning's jeep was being unloaded, a few German shells exploded
nearby. Colonel Chatterton promptly threw himself into the closest
ditch. "I shall never forget Browning standing above me, looking like
some sort of explorer, and asking, "George, whatever in the world are
you doing down there?"'" Chatterton was frank. "I'm bloody well
hiding, sir," he said. "Well, you can bloody well stop hiding,"
Browning told him. "It's time we were going." From a pocket in his
tunic, Browning took out a parcel wrapped in tissue paper. Handing it
to Chatterton, he said, "Put it on my jeep." Chatterton unfolded the
tissue and saw that it contained a pennant bearing a light-blue Pegasus
against a maroon background, the insignia of the British Airborne. *
With the pennant fluttering from the jeep's fender, the commander of
the Market forces drove away. * Some accounts have stated that
Browning's pennant was made by his wife, the novelist Daphne du
Maurier. "I am sorry," she writes, histo disappoint the myth-makers
... but anyone who has seen my attempts to thread a needle would know
this was beyond me. It is a delightful thought, however, and would
have greatly amused my husband." Actually, the pennant was made by
Hobson and Sons Ltd., London, under the supervision of Miss Claire
Miller, who also, at Browning's direction, hand-sewed tiny compasses
into 500 shirt collars and belts just prior to Market-Garden.

At Renkum Heath west of Arnhem, Lieutenant Neville Hay, the highly
trained specialist in charge of the fact-gathering liaison unit
"Phantom," was totally baffled. His team of experts had assembled
their radio set with its special antenna and expected immediate contact
with General Browning's Corps headquarters. Hay's first priority on
landing was to get through to Corps and give his position. Earlier, he
had learned that Division communications had broken down. While he
might have anticipated that problems would arise among the less
experienced Royal Signal Corps operators, he was not prepared to
believe that the difficulties he was having stemmed from his own men.
"We were set up on the landing zone and, although it was screened by
pine woods, we had got through in considerably worse country than

this," he remembers. "We kept trying and getting absolutely nothing."
Until he could discover where the trouble lay, there was no way of
informing General Browning of the progress of General Urquhart's
division or of relaying Browning's orders to the British 1/ Airborne.
Ironically, the Dutch telephone system was in full operation, including
a special network owned and operated by the PGEM power station
authorities at Nijmegen and connected with the entire province. Had he
known, all Hay had to do, with the aid of the Dutch resistance, was to
pick up a telephone.

Fifteen miles away there was already anxiety at General Browning's
headquarters, now set up on the edge of the Groesbeek ridge. Both of
the 82nd Airborne's large communication sets had been damaged on
landing. Browning's had come through safely, and one of these was
allocated to the 82nd, insuring immediate communication with General
Gavin. The Corps communications section had also made radio contact
with General Dempsey's British 2nd Army and Airborne Corps rear
headquarters in England and Browning had radio contact with the 101/.
But the signal section was unable to raise Urquhart's division.
Brigadier Walch believes that Corps signals was to blame. "Before the
operation was planned, we asked for a proper headquarters signals
section," he says. "We were frightfully cognizant that our sets were
inadequate and our headquarters signals staff weak and inexperienced."
While Browning could direct and influence the movements of the 82nd,
the 101/ and Horrocks' XXX Corps, at this vital junction the
all-important battle at Arnhem was beyond his control. As Walch says,
"We had absolutely no idea what was happening in Arnhem."

A kind of creeping paralysis was already beginning to affect
Montgomery's plan. But at this early stage no one knew it. Throughout
the entire Market-Garden area, some 20,000 Allied soldiers were in
Holland, heading out to secure the bridges and

hold open the corridor for the massive Garden units whose lead tanks
were expected to link up with 101/ paratroopers by nightfall.

From the flat roof of a large factory near the Meuse-Escaut Canal,
General Brian Horrocks, commander of the British XXX Corps, watched the
last of the huge airborne glider formations pass over his waiting
tanks. He had been on the roof since 11 A.m., and as he put it, "I had
plenty of time to think." The sight of the vast armada was
"comforting, but I was under no illusion that this was going to be an
easy battle," Horrocks remembers. Meticulously, he had covered every
possible contingency, even to ordering his men to take as much food,
gas and ammunition as they could carry, "since we were likely to be out
in the blue on our own." There was one worry the General could not
eliminate, but he had not discussed it with anyone-- he did not like a
Sunday attack. "No assault or attack in which I had taken part during
the war which started on a Sunday had ever been completely successful."
Bringing up his binoculars, he studied the white ribbon of road
stretching away north toward Valkenswaard and Eindhoven. Satisfied
that the airborne assault had now begun, Horrocks gave the order for
the Garden forces to attack. At precisely 2:15 P.m., with a thunderous
roar, some 350 guns opened fire.

The bombardment was devastating. Ton after ton of explosives flayed
the enemy positions up ahead. The hurricane of fire, ranging five
miles in depth and concentrated over a one-mile front, caused the earth
to shake beneath the tanks of the Irish

Guards as they lumbered up to the start line. Behind the lead
squadrons, hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles began to move slowly
out of their parking positions, ready to fall into line as the first
tanks moved off. And up above, a "cab rank" of rocket-firing Typhoon
fighters circled endlessly, waiting on call for the commander of the
Irish Guards Group, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur, to direct them to
targets up ahead. At 2:35 P.m., standing in the turret of the lead
tank of No. 3 Squadron, Lieutenant Keith Heathcote shouted into his
microphone, "Driver, advance!"

Slowly the tanks rumbled out of the bridgehead and moved up the road at
eight miles an hour. Now, the curtain of artillery fire lifted to
creep ahead of the armor at exactly the same speed. Tankers could see
shells bursting barely one hundred yards in front of them. As the
squadrons moved forward, engulfed in the dust of the barrage, men could
not tell at times whether the tanks were safely back of their own
fire.

Behind the lead squadrons came the scout cars of Lieutenant Colonel Joe
Vandeleur and his cousin Giles. Standing in his car, Vandeleur could
see, both in front of and behind him, infantry riding on the tanks,
each tank marked with yellow streamers to identify it to the Typhoons
above. "The din was unimaginable," Vandeleur remembers, "but
everything was going according to plan." By now, the lead tanks had
burst out of the bridgehead and were across the Dutch frontier.
Captain "Mick" O'Cock, commanding No. 3 Squadron, radioed back,
"Advance going well. Leading squadron has got through." Then, in
seconds, the picture changed. As Vandeleur recalls, "The Germans
really began to paste us."

Ensconced in well-hidden, fortified positions on both sides of the
road, German gunners had not only survived the tremendous barrage but
had waited until it passed over them. Holding their fire, the Germans
let the first few tanks go through. Then, within two minutes three
tanks of the lead squadron and six of the next were knocked out of
action. Burning and disabled, they littered a half mile of road. "We
had just crossed the border when we were

ambushed," Lieutenant Cyril Russell recalls. "Suddenly the tanks in
front either slewed across the road or burned where they stood. The
awful realization dawned on me that the next one to go was the one I
was sitting on. We jumped into the ditches by the roadside." As
Russell went forward to see how the remainder of his platoon was
faring, a machine gun opened up; he was hit in the arm and fell back
into the ditch. For Russell, the war was over.

Lance Corporal James Doggart's tank was hit. "I don't remember seeing
or hearing the explosion," he says. "I was suddenly flat on my back in
a ditch with the tank leaning over me. I had a Bren gun across my
chest and next to me was a young lad with his arm nearly severed.
Nearby, another of our men was dead. The tank was on fire and I don't
recall seeing any of the crew get out."

Lieutenant Barry Quinan, in the last tank of the lead squadron,
remembers that his Sherman swung left into a ditch, and Quinan thought
the driver was trying to bypass the burning tanks ahead. But the tank
had been hit by a shell which killed both the driver and codriver. The
Sherman began to burn and Quinan's gunner, "trying to scramble out of
the hatch, half lifted me out of the turret before I realized we were
"brewing up."" As the two men climbed out of the tank, Quinan saw
others coming up behind. One after the other, the tanks were hit. "I
actually saw the commander of one tank trying to shield his face from a
sheet of flame that engulfed the entire machine."

The breakout had been stopped before it had really begun and nine
disabled tanks now blocked the road. Squadrons coming up could not
advance. Even if they could bypass the burning hulks, hidden German
gunners would pick them off. To get the advance rolling again,
Vandeleur called in the rocket-firing Typhoons and, aided by purple
smoke shells fired from the tanks to indicate suspected German
positions, the fighters screamed down. "It was the first time I had
ever seen Typhoons in action," Vandeleur recalls, "and I was amazed at
the guts of those pilots. They came in, one at a time, head to tail,
flying right through our own barrage. One disintegrated right above
me. It was incredible--

guns firing, the roar of planes, the shouts and curses of the men. In
the middle of it all, Division asked how the battle was going. My
second in command just held up the microphone and said, "Listen.""

As the planes swooped down on their targets, Vandeleur sent forward an
armored bulldozer to push the burning tanks off the road. The bedlam
of the battle now raged over several miles of highway, stretching back
as far as Vandeleur's own car and the R.a.f. communications tender,
which called the Typhoons down on demand. Flight Lieutenant Donald
Love, the fighter reconnaissance pilot attached to the communications
unit, was now convinced that he should never have volunteered for the
job. While Squadron Leader Max Sutherland directed the Typhoons, Love
got out to see what was happening. Black smoke billowed up from the
road ahead and an antitank gun carrier, almost in front of the
communications tender, was afire. As Love watched, a Bren gun carrier
came back along the road carrying wounded. One man's shoulder was
blown off, and his clothes were burned and charred. "I was sure we
were surrounded," says Love. "I was horrified and I kept wondering why
hadn't I stayed with the Air Force, where I belonged."

The waiting tankers farther back in the halted columns felt, as Captain
Roland Langton describes it, "a strange sense of powerlessness. We
could go neither forward nor backward." Langton watched infantry
moving up to clean out the woods on either side of the road with two
Bren gun carriers out in front. Langton thought the soldiers might be
an advance party of the 43rd Infantry Division. "Suddenly I saw both
carriers catapulted into the air," Langton remembers. "They had run
over enemy land mines." When the smoke cleared, Langton saw "bodies in
the trees. I don't know how many, it was impossible to tell. There
were pieces of men hanging from every limb."

With the Typhoons firing only yards away from them, the British
infantry men grimly began to dig out the Germans from their hidden
trenches. Lance Corporal Doggart had escaped from the ditch where he
landed when his tank was hit. He raced across

the road and jumped into an empty enemy slit trench. "At the same
moment, two Germans--one a young fellow without a jacket, the other a
tough-looking bastard of about thirty-- jumped in after me from the
opposite direction," Doggart says. Without hesitating, Doggart kicked
the older German in the face. The younger man, immediately cowed,
surrendered. Covering both with his rifle, Doggart sent them marching
back along the road "with streams of other Germans, all running with
their hands behind their heads. Those that were too slow got a fast
kick in the backside."

From the woods, in ditches, around haystacks and along the roadway, now
being slowly cleared of the disabled tanks, came the stutter of Sten
guns as the infantry mopped up. The Guardsmen showed no quarter,
particularly toward snipers. Men remember that prisoners were made to
double-time down the road, and when they slowed they were promptly
prodded with bayonets. One prisoner in the now-growing lines tried to
break away, but there was more than a company of infantry in the
vicinity and several men recall that--in the words of one--"he was dead
the second the thought entered his mind."

Joe Vandeleur watched the prisoners being marched past his scout car.
As one German came along, Vandeleur caught a sudden movement. "The
bastard had taken a grenade he'd concealed and lobbed it into one of
our gun carriers. It went off with a tremendous explosion and I saw
one of my sergeants lying in the road with his leg blown off. The
German was cut down on all sides by machine guns."

At his command post, General Horrocks received word that the road was
gradually being cleared and that the infantry, although suffering heavy
casualties, had routed the Germans on the flanks. As he later put it,
"The Micks were getting tired of being shot at, and as so often happens
with these great fighters, they suddenly lost their tempers."

Perhaps no one was more enraged than Captain Eamon Fitzgerald, the 2nd
Battalion's intelligence officer, who interrogated the captured crew of
an antitank gun. According to Lieutenant

Colonel Giles Vandeleur, "Fitzgerald had an interesting way of
extracting information. A huge giant of a man, he spoke German well,
but with an atrocious accent. His normal custom was to produce his
pistol, poke it into the German's belly and, standing as close as
possible, shout questions in the man's face." The results, Vandeleur
always thought, "were positively splendid. Within a few minutes after
interrogating this crew, our tanks were picking off the German
camouflaged antitank positions with creditable accuracy and the road
was being sufficiently cleared to allow us to continue the advance."

Many Irish Guardsmen believe Sergeant Bertie Cowan turned the tide of
the battle. Commanding a 17-pounder Sherman, Cowan had spotted a
German antitank position and demolished it with a single shot. During
the fight, Major Edward G. Tyler, in command of the squadron, was
astonished to see that a German was standing on Cowan's tank directing
operations. He saw the tank cross the road and open fire; then, busy
himself, Tyler forgot the incident. Later, Tyler learned that Cowan
had knocked out three German guns. "When I could take a moment, I went
to congratulate him," Tyler says. "Cowan told me the Jerry on his tank
had been a crew chief in the first position he'd overrun who had
surrendered." He had been interrogated by Captain Fitzgerald and then
returned to Cowan where he had proven "most cooperative."

The Irish Guards were on the way again, but constant fighting
continued. The German crust was far tougher than anyone had
anticipated. Among the prisoners were men of renowned parachute
battalions and--to the complete surprise of the British--veteran
infantrymen from the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions: elements of the
combat groups General Wilhelm Bittrich had sent to bolster Student's
First Parachute Army. To compound the surprise, some prisoners were
discovered to belong to General von Zangen's Fifteenth Army. As the
Irish Guards' war diary notes, "Our intelligence spent the day in a
state of indignant surprise: one German regiment after another appeared
which had no right to be there."

General Horrocks had expected that his lead tanks would drive the
thirteen miles to Eindhoven "within two to three hours." Precious time
had been lost, and the Irish Guards would cover only seven miles,
reaching Valkenswaard by nightfall. Market-Garden was already
ominously behind schedule.

In order to be as mobile as possible, General Maxwell D. Taylor's
gliders had brought in mostly jeeps--no artillery. The fact that the
British were late in reaching Eindhoven was a blow. Taylor had hoped
for the support of the tankers' guns along the fifteen-mile stretch of
corridor the Screaming Eagles must control. Taylor's Dutch liaison
officers discovered the true situation--that the 101/ would have to
operate independently for longer than planned--almost immediately; with
the aid of the resistance, they simply used the telephone to learn what
was happening with the British.

With lightning speed Taylor's paratroopers took Veghel, the
northernmost objective along the corridor, and its four crossings--the
rail and highway bridges over the river Aa and the Willems Canal.
Heavy fighting would ensue; nevertheless, these four objectives were
seized within two hours. Farther south, midway between Veghel and Son,
the town of St. Oedenrode and its highway crossing over the Dommel
river were captured with relative ease. According to official Dutch
telephone log books, Johanna Lathouwers, a loyal operator with the
state telephone exchange, heard "an unmistakable American voice came on
the Oed 1 (st. Oedenrode) line, at 1425 hours, asking for
Valkenswaard, a connection that lasted forty minutes." * * By Allied
clocks it was actually 1525 hours; there was a one-hour difference
between German and British times.

The Americans quickly learned that the spearhead of the Garden forces
had not as yet even reached Valkenswaard. It now seemed unlikely that
Horrocks' tanks, already delayed, would reach Eindhoven at the southern
end of the corridor before

nightfall; and that would be too late to help the Americans seize and
control their widespread targets. The men of the 101/ had achieved
spectacular success. Now, they ran into problems.

The most pressing of Taylor's objectives was the highway bridge over
the Wilhelmina Canal at Son, approximately five miles north of
Eindhoven. As a contingency plan in case this main traffic artery was
blown, Taylor had decided to seize a bridge over the canal at Best,
four miles to the west. Because the bridge was considered secondary,
only a single company of the 502nd Regiment was detailed to Best, and
it was thought that only a few Germans would be in the area. Taylor's
intelligence was unaware that Colonel General Student's headquarters
lay only ten miles northwest of the 101/ drop zones and that recent
arrivals of Von Zangen's Fifteenth Army were quartered at nearby
Tilburg. Among these forces was Major General Walter Poppe's battered
59th Infantry Division plus a considerable amount of artillery.

Almost immediately upon approaching the bridge, H Company radioed that
it had run into enemy roadblocks and was meeting strong resistance.
The message signaled the beginning of a bloody battle that would last
throughout the night and most of the following two days. What had
begun as a single-company operation eventually involved more than an
entire regiment. But already the heroic men of H Company, though
taking heavy casualties, were blunting the first, unexpectedly strong,
German blows.

While H Company was setting out for the bridge at Best, Colonel Robert
F. Sink's 506th Regiment was going for the main highway bridge at Son.
There was almost no opposition until troops reached the northern
outskirts of the village. Then they were fired on by a German 88
artillery piece. In less than ten minutes, the advance party destroyed
the gun emplacement with a bazooka and killed its crew. Fighting
through the streets, the Americans were a bare fifty yards from the
canal itself when the bridge was blown up, debris falling all around
the paratroopers. For Colonel Sink, who was to take Eindhoven and its
crossings by 8 P.m., the loss of the bridge was a bitter blow.
Reacting quickly and still under fire, three men --Major James LaPrade,
Second

Lieutenant Millford F. Weller and Sergeant John Dunning--dived into the
canal and swam to the far side. Other members of the battalion
followed their lead or went across in rowboats. On the southern bank,
they subdued the German opposition and set up a bridgehead.

The central column of the bridge was still intact, and 101/ engineers
immediately began the construction of a temporary crossing. Help came
from an unexpected source. Dutch civilians reported that a
considerable amount of black-market lumber was being stored by a
contractor in a nearby garage. Within one and a half hours the
engineers, utilizing the bridge's center trestle and the liberated
lumber, spanned the canal. As Colonel Sink recalled, "the bridge was
unsatisfactory from every point of view, except that it did enable me
to put the rest of the regiment across, single file." Until bridging
equipment could be brought up, the Market-Garden corridor at Son was
reduced to a single wooden footpath.

Field Marshal Model was still shaken when he reached General Bittrich's
headquarters at Doetinchem. Normally, it would have taken him no
longer than half an hour to cover the distance, but today, because he
had made numerous stops along the way to alert area commanders to the
airborne assault, the trip had lasted well over an hour. Although the
Field Marshal seemed calm, Bittrich remembers "his first words to me
were, "They almost got me! They were after the headquarters. Imagine!
They almost got me!""

Bittrich immediately brought Model up to date on the latest

information received by II SS Panzer Corps. No clear picture of the
Allied intent was emerging as yet, but Bittrich told Model his own
theory: that the assault was aimed at containing the Fifteenth Army
while the British Second Army drove for the Ruhr. That would require
the Allies to capture the Nijmegen and Arnhem bridges. Model disagreed
completely. The Arnhem bridge was not the objective, he said. These
airborne troops would swerve and march northeast for the Ruhr. The
situation, Model believed, was still too obscure for any final
conclusions. He was puzzled as to why airborne forces had landed in
the Nijmegen area. Nevertheless, he approved the measures Bittrich had
already taken.

Bittrich still pressed the subject of the bridges. "Herr Field
Marshal, I strongly urge that the bridges at Nijmegen and Arnhem be
immediately destroyed," he said. Model looked at him in amazement.
"They will not be destroyed," he told Bittrich firmly. "No matter what
the English plan, these bridges can be defended. No. Absolutely not.
The bridges are not to be blown." Then, dismissing the subject, Model
said, "I'm looking for a new headquarters, Bittrich." Before Bittrich
could answer, Model said again musingly, "You know, they almost got
me."

At his headquarters at Vught, Colonel General Kurt Student faced a
dilemma: his First Parachute Army had been split in two by the airborne
assault. Without telephone communications and now solely dependent on
radio, he was unable to direct his divided army. For the moment units
were fighting on their own without any cohesive direction. Then, by a
momentous and fantastic stroke of luck, an undamaged briefcase found in
a downed Waco glider near his headquarters was rushed to him.

"It was incredible," Student says. "In the case was the complete enemy
attack order for the operation." Student and his staff officers pored
over the captured plans. "They showed us everything --the dropping
zones, the corridor, the objectives, even the

names of the divisions involved. Everything! Immediately we could see
the strategic implications. They had to grab the bridges before we
could destroy them. All I could think of was, "This is retribution.
Retribution! History is repeating itself." During our airborne
operation in Holland in 1940, one of my officers, against strict
orders, had taken into battle papers that detailed our entire attack,
and these had fallen into enemy hands. Now the wheel had turned full
circle. I knew exactly what I had to do." * * In the legend of Arnhem
the story of the captured documents, like that of the spy Lindemans, is
always included. Some accounts claim that the Market-Garden plan was
found on the body of a dead American captain. I interviewed Student
and examined all his documents. At no point does he confirm that the
briefcase was carried by a captain. Nor is there any such mention in
official British and American records. Perhaps, since Student says
that the plans came from "a Waco freight glider," it was generally
assumed that only American personnel were aboard. However, part of
General Browning's Corps headquarters flew to Holland in Wacos; and one
of these did crash-land near Student's headquarters. In any case,
whether the personnel were British or American, I think it highly
unlikely that the entire Market-Garden operational plan could have been
in the possession of a captain. First, great care was taken in the
distribution of the plan; and second, each copy was both numbered and
restricted solely to officers of staff rank.

Model, as yet, did not. Student had never felt so frustrated. Because
of his communications breakdown, it would be nearly ten hours before he
could place the secret of Market-Garden in Model's possession. The
secret was that the Arnhem bridge was of crucial importance. The
captured plans clearly showed that it was Montgomery's route into the
Ruhr.

This was the kind of battle that Model liked best: one that demanded
improvisation, daring and, above all, speed. From Bittrich's
headquarters, Model telephoned OB West, Von Rundstedt. With
characteristic abruptness, he described the situation and asked for
immediate reinforcements. "The only way this airborne assault can be
defeated is to strike hard within the first twenty-four hours," he told
Von Rundstedt. Model asked for anti-aircraft units, self-propelled
guns, tanks and infantry; and he wanted them on the move to Arnhem by
nightfall. Von Rund-

stedt told him that such reinforcements as were available would be on
the way. Turning to Bittrich, Model said triumphantly, "Now, we'll get
reinforcements!" Model had decided to operate from Doetinchem; but,
although he was apparently recovered from the shock of his hasty
departure from Oosterbeek, this time he was taking no chances of being
caught unawares. He refused accommodations at the castle; he would
direct the battle from the gardener's cottage on the grounds.

Bittrich's early foresight was already having its effect. Sections of
Harzer's Hohenstaufen Division were heading swiftly toward the battle
zone. Harmel's Frundsberg Division-- Harmel himself was expected back
from Germany during the night--were on the move, too. Bittrich had
ordered Harzer to set up his headquarters in a high school in the
northern Arnhem suburbs overlooking the city, and that transfer was
underway. But Harzer was chafing with impatience. The armored
vehicles that had been scheduled to leave for Germany in the early
afternoon were still being refitted with tracks and guns. Harzer had
already moved the units closest to the British landing and drop zones
into blocking positions at points west of Arnhem. For the moment, he
had only a few armored cars, several self-propelled guns, a few tanks
and some infantry. Still, Harzer hoped that by employing hit-and-run
tactics he could halt and confuse British troops until the bulk of his
division was again battle-ready.

Curiously, Harzer did not even know that Major Sepp Krafft's SS Panzer
Grenadier Training and Reserve Battalion was in the area and, at the
moment, the only unit in the path of the British airborne forces.
Harzer concentrated his own strength on the two major highways running
into Arnhem: the Ede-Arnhem road and the Utrecht-Arnhem road. Certain
that the paratroopers must use these main arteries, he placed his units
in a semicircular screen across the two highways. By oversight, or
perhaps because he lacked sufficient forces at the moment, Harzer
failed to position any groups along a quiet secondary road running
parallel to the northern bank of the Rhine. It was the single
unprotected route the British could take to the Arnhem bridge.

11

In their camouflage battle smocks and distinctive crash helmets, laden
with weapons and ammunition, the men of Brigadier Lathbury's 1/
Parachute Brigade were on the way to Arnhem. Interspersed among the
columns of marching troopers were jeeps pulling artillery pieces and
four-wheeled carts loaded with guns and stores. As General Roy
Urquhart watched them pass, he remembered a compliment paid him some
months before by General Horrocks. "Your men are killers," Horrocks
had said admiringly. At the time, Urquhart had considered the remark
an overstatement. On this Sunday, he was not so sure. As the 1/
Brigade had moved off, Urquhart had felt a surge of pride.

The plan called for the three battalions of Lathbury's brigade to
converge on Arnhem, each from a different direction. Lieutenant
Colonel John Frost's 2nd Battalion was given the prime objective:
marching along a secondary road running close to the north bank of the
Rhine, Frost's men were to capture the main highway bridge. En route,
they were to take the railway and pontoon bridges west of the great
highway crossing. The 3rd Battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel J. A. C.
Fitch, would move along the Utrecht-Arnhem road and approach the bridge
from the north, reinforcing Frost. Once these two battalions had been
successfully launched, Lieutenant Colonel D. Dobie's 1/ Battalion was
to advance along the main Ede-Arnhem highway--the most northerly
route--and occupy the high ground north of the city. Lathbury had
given each route a code name. Dobie's, farthest north, was designated
"Leopard"; Fitch's, in the middle,

was "Tiger"; and Frost's, the most crucial route, was "Lion." Speeding
ahead of the entire brigade, the jeeps of Major Freddie Gough's
reconnaissance squadron were expected to reach the bridge, seize it in
a coup de main, and hold until Frost arrived.

So far, Urquhart thought, the initial phase was going well. He was not
unduly alarmed by the breakdown of communications within the division
at this time. He had experienced temporary signals disruption often in
the North African desert campaigns. Since he could not raise Brigadier
Hicks's 1/ Airlanding Brigade, whose job it was to hold the landing and
drop zones for the air lifts on the following two days, Urquhart drove
to Hicks's headquarters. The Airlanding Brigade, he learned, was in
position, and Hicks was for the moment away directing the disposition
of his battalions. However, at Hicks's headquarters, Urquhart received
news that one vital part of the plan to take the Arnhem bridge had gone
wrong. He was told--erroneously--that most of Major Freddie Gough's
reconnaissance vehicles had been lost in glider crashes; no one at
Hicks's headquarters knew where Gough had gone. Without waiting for
Hicks to return, Urquhart drove back to his own headquarters. He had
to find Gough quickly and devise some alternative plan, but his
greatest concern now was to warn Lathbury and, in particular, Frost,
that the 2nd Battalion was on its own. Frost would have to take the
main Arnhem bridge without the aid of Gough's planned surprise
attack.

At Division, further bad news awaited Urquhart. "Not only was there no
word of Gough," Urquhart recalls, "but apart from some short-range
radio signals, headquarters communications had completely failed. The
1/ Parachute Brigade and, indeed, the outside world, could not be
contacted." Colonel Charles Mackenzie, Urquhart's chief of staff,
watched the General pace up and down, "restive and anxious for news."
Urquhart ordered his signals officer, Major Anthony Deane-Drummond, to
investigate the "communications foul-up, see what had happened to the
radio equipment and then set it right." Messengers were also sent out
in search of Gough. As time passed without any new information, the
worried Urquhart decided to wait no longer. Normally, he

would have directed the battle from Division headquarters; but now, as
each moment passed without communications, he was beginning to feel
that this battle was anything but normal. Turning to Mackenzie, he
said, "I think I'll go and have a look myself, Charles." Mackenzie did
not try to stop him. "At the time," Mackenzie recalls, "since we were
getting practically no information, it didn't seem a particularly bad
thing to do." Taking only his driver and a signalman in his jeep,
Urquhart set out after Lathbury. The time was 4:30 P.m.

Moving along the northern, Leopard route--the Ede-Arnhem road--Major
Freddie Gough of the 1/ Airlanding reconnaissance unit was making good
time. Although the vehicles of A troop had failed to arrive, Gough had
started off from the landing zone with the rest of the squadrons at
3:30 P.m. He was confident that he had sufficient jeeps for the coup de
main attempt on the bridge. "In fact," he remembered, "I left several
jeeps behind on the landing zone in reserve. We had more than enough
to get to Arnhem." Gough had even detached twelve men from his unit to
make their way south to join the 2nd Battalion, moving on the Lion
route to the bridge. He was unaware that the loss of A troop's jeeps
had raised a flurry of rumors and misinformation. * * Some accounts of
the Arnhem battle claim that Gough's unit could not operate because so
many of his vehicles failed to arrive by glider. "The failure, if it
can be called that," Gough says, "was not due to a lack of jeeps, but
to the fact that no one had warned us that the 9th and 10th SS Panzer
divisions were in the area."

From the beginning, Gough had had reservations about his recco unit's
role in the Arnhem plan. Instead of a coup de main, Gough had urged
that a screen of reconnaissance jeeps be sent ahead of each of the
three battalions. "In that way," he says, "we would have quickly
discovered the best and easiest way to reach the bridge." Failing
that, he had asked that a troop of light tanks be brought in by glider
to escort the coup de main force. Both requests had been turned down.
Yet Gough had remained optimistic. "I wasn't the least bit concerned.
There were supposed to

be only a few old, gray Germans in Arnhem and some ancient tanks and
guns. I expected it to be a pushover."

Now, as they moved swiftly along Leopard, the lead jeeps of the unit
were suddenly ambushed by German armored cars and 20 mm. guns.
Gough's second in command, Captain David Allsop, happened to note the
time. It was exactly 4 P.m. Gough pulled out to drive to the head of
the column and investigate. "Just as I was on the point of going
forward, I got a message saying that Urquhart wanted to see me
immediately. I didn't know what the hell to do," Gough says. "I was
under Lathbury, and I thought I should at least tell him I was going,
but I had no idea where he was. The unit was now in a heavy fire fight
and pinned down in defensive positions near the railroad tracks on the
outskirts of Wolfheze. I reckoned they would be all right for a time,
so I turned around and headed back to Division headquarters on the
landing zone. That was at 4:30."

At the precise moment that General Urquhart set out to find Lathbury,
Gough was speeding back to Division to report to Urquhart.

All along the three strategic lines of march, the men of the 1/
Parachute Brigade were encountering jubilant, hysterical throngs of
Dutch. Many civilians from farms and outlying hamlets had followed the
paratroopers from the time they left the landing zones, and as the
crowds grew, the welcome seemed almost to overwhelm the march itself.
Captain Eric Mackay, traveling the southernmost, Lion route with
Colonel Frost's 2nd Battalion, was disturbed by the holiday atmosphere.
"We were hampered by Dutch civilians," he says. "Waving, cheering and
clapping their hands, they offered us apples, pears, something to
drink. But they interfered with our progress and filled me with dread
that they would give our positions away." Lieutenant Robin Vlasto
remembers that "the first part of our march was in the nature of a
victory parade, and the civilians were quite delirious with joy. It

all seemed so unbelievable that we almost expected to see Horrocks' XXX
Corps tanks coming out of Arnhem to meet us. People lined the road and
great trays of beer, milk and fruit were offered. We had the greatest
difficulty forcing the men to keep alive to the possibility of a German
attack."

Young Anje van Maanen, whose father was a doctor in Oosterbeek, recalls
receiving an exuberant call from the Tromp family in Heelsum, just
south of the British landing zone on Renkum Heath. "We are free.
Free!" the Tromps told her. "The Tommies dropped behind our house and
they are on their way to Oosterbeek. They are so nice! We are smoking
Players and eating chocolate." Anje put the phone down, "crazy with
joy. We all jumped and danced around. This is it! An invasion!
Lovely!" Seventeen-year-old Anje could hardly wait for her father to
come home. Dr. van Maanen was delivering a baby at a patient's home,
and Anje thought it "very annoying, particularly now, because the
husband of the woman was a Dutch Nazi." Mrs. Ida Clous, the wife of
an Oosterbeek dentist and a friend of the Van Maanens, also heard that
the airborne troops were on their way. She worked feverishly, hunting
through boxes and sewing scraps to find every bit of orange cloth she
possessed. When the British got to Oosterbeek, she intended to rush
outside with her three small children and greet the deliverers with
small handmade orange flags.

Jan Voskuil, hiding out in the home of his wife's parents in
Oosterbeek, was torn between his own desire to head up the Utrecht road
to greet the paratroopers and the need to prevent his father-in-law
from coming with him. The elder man was adamant. "I'm seventy-eight
years old and I've never been in a war before and I want to see it."
Voskuil's father-in-law was finally persuaded to stay in the garden and
Voskuil, joining streams of other civilians heading out to meet the
British, was turned back by a policeman on the outskirts of Oosterbeek.
"It's too dangerous," the officer told the crowds. "Go back."
Voskuil walked slowly home. There he ran into the same German soldier
who had asked for shelter when the bombing had begun during

the morning. Now the soldier was in full uniform, with camouflage
jacket, helmet and rifle. He offered Voskuil some chocolates and
cigarettes. "I am going away now," he said. "The Tommies will come."
Voskuil smiled. "Now, you will go back to Germany," he said. The
soldier studied Voskuil for several seconds. Then he shook his head
slowly. "No, sir," he told Voskuil. "We will fight." The Dutchman
watched the German walk away. "It begins now," Voskuil thought, "but
what can I do?" Impatiently he paced the yard. There was nothing to
do but wait.

Unhampered by police restraints or warnings to stay indoors, Dutch
farmers and their families lined each route of march in throngs.
Sergeant Major Harry Callaghan, on the middle, Tiger route, remembers a
farm woman breaking through the crowds and running toward him with a
pitcher of milk. He thanked her and the woman smiled and said, "Good,
Tommy. Good." But, like Eric Mackay on the lower road, Callaghan, a
Dunkirk veteran, was bothered by the number of civilians surrounding
the troops. "They ran along beside us wearing armbands, aprons, and
little pieces of ribbon, all orange," he remembers. "Children, with
little snippets of orange cloth pinned to their skirts or blouses,
skipped along, shrieking with delight. Most of the men were reaching
in their packs to hand them chocolate. It was such a different
atmosphere that the men were behaving as if they were on an exercise.
I began to be concerned about snipers."

As Callaghan had feared, the victory parade came to a sudden halt. "It
all happened so quickly," he says. "One moment we were marching
steadily toward Arnhem; the next, we were scattered in the ditches.
Snipers had opened fire, and three dead airborne soldiers lay across
the road." The veteran sergeant major wasted no time. He had spotted
a burst of flame from trees about fifty yards ahead. As the Dutch
scattered, Callaghan took a party of twelve men forward. He stopped
short of one tree and looked up. Something flashed. Raising his Sten
gun, he fired directly into the tree. A Schmeisser automatic pistol
clattered to the ground and, as Callaghan sighted up along the trunk of
the tree, he saw a German dangling limply from a rope.

Now, too, on the middle route, other men from Lieutenant Colonel
Fitch's 3rd Battalion were suddenly engaged in an unexpected encounter.
Private Frederick Bennett had just passed around some apples to other
troopers when a German staff car came speeding down the road. Bennett
opened up with his Sten gun. The car screeched to a stop and tried to
back up. But it was too late. Everyone near Bennett began firing and
the car came to an abrupt halt, riddled with bullets. As the troopers
cautiously approached, they saw that the driver was hanging halfway out
of the car. The body of a senior German officer had been thrown partly
out another door. To Bennett "he looked like some high-ranking Jerry
officer," as indeed he was. Major General Kussin, the Arnhem town
commander, had disregarded the warning of SS Major Sepp Krafft to avoid
the main Utrecht-Arnhem road. * * Kussin, on Model's orders issued as
the Field Marshal fled east that morning, had informed Hitler's
headquarters of the landings and of Model's narrow escape. The Allied
assault had caused Hitler hysterical concern. "If such a mess happens
here," he conjectured, "here I sit with my own Supreme
Command--Goering, Himmler, Ribbentrop. Well, then, this is a most
worthwhile catch. That's obvious. I would not hesitate to risk two
parachute divisions here if with one blow I could get my hands on the
whole German command."

Many men recall that the first serious German opposition began after
the first hour of march--around 4:30 P.m. Then two of the three
battalions--Dobie's, on the northern route, and Fitch's, in the
center--were unexpectedly engaged in fierce enemy hit-and-run attacks.
Major Gough's reconnaissance unit, now commanded by Captain Allsop, was
desperately trying to find a way to outflank the German forces and
clear a path for Dobie's 1/ Battalion. But, according to Allsop, "each
movement we made was blunted by an enemy force in front of us."
Trooper William Chandler of the reconnaissance unit remembers that as
his C Troop explored the terrain, "German bullets came so close and so
thick that they almost stung as they went by."

As the battalion approached Wolfheze, it was almost completely stopped.
"We halted," Private Walter Boldock recalls. "Then we started off
again. Then we halted and dug in. Next, we moved on again, changing
direction. Our progress was dictated by the success of the lead
companies. Mortar bombs and bullets

harassed us all the way." Beside a hedge, Boldock saw a sergeant he
knew, lying seriously wounded. Farther ahead, he came upon the
smoldering body of a lieutenant. He had been hit by a phosphorus bomb.
To another soldier, Private Roy Edwards, "it just seemed we kept
making a detour of the countryside and getting into running battles all
afternoon."

The paratroopers were stunned by the ferociousness of the unanticipated
enemy attacks. Private Andrew Milbourne, on the northern route, heard
firing in the distance off to the south and was momentarily glad that
the 1/ Battalion had been given the assignment to hold the high ground
north of Arnhem. Then, nearing Wolfheze, Milbourne realized that the
column had swung south off the main road. He saw the railway station
and, close to it, a tank. His first reaction was one of elation. "My
God!" he thought, "Monty was right. The Second Army's here already!"
Then, as the turret swung slowly around, Milbourne saw that a black
cross was painted on the tank. Suddenly, he seemed to see Germans
everywhere. He dived into a ditch and, raising his head cautiously,
began looking for a good spot to position his Vickers machine gun.

Sergeant Reginald Isherwood saw the same tank. A jeep towing a light
artillery piece drove up and started to turn around in order to engage
it. "One of their sergeants yelled, "We'd better fire before they do.
Otherwise we've had it,"" Isherwood recalls. "The gun was swung around
like lightning, but as our man yelled "Fire!" I heard the German
commander do the same. The Jerries must have got their shell off one
tenth of a second sooner than us." The tank scored a direct hit. The
jeep exploded and the gun crew were killed.

In the mounting confusion and the intense fire from all sides, it was
now clear to Colonel Dobie that the opposition in front of him was
heavier than anyone had expected. Nor did he believe it was still
possible to occupy the high ground north of Arnhem. He was unable to
raise Brigadier Lathbury by radio, and his casualties were mounting by
the minute. Dobie decided to side-slip the

battalion still farther south and attempt to join up with Frost going
for the main Arnhem bridge.

The breakdown of communications and subsequent lack of direction was
making it impossible for battalion commanders to know with any clarity
what was happening now. In the unfamiliar countryside, with maps that
often proved highly inaccurate, companies and platoons were frequently
out of touch with one another. At a crossroads near the stretch of
highway where men of Colonel Fitch's 3rd Battalion had killed General
Kussin, the British caught the full brunt of SS Major Krafft's
rocket-propelled mortars and machine guns. The marching columns broke
as men scattered into the woods. The screeching mortars, exploding in
air bursts above their heads, hurled deadly fragments in every
direction.

Signalman Stanley Heyes remembers the intense enemy harassment vividly.
He sprinted for some woods and dropped a spare radio transmitter;
bending to recover it he was struck in the ankle. Heyes managed to
crawl into the woods. As he sank down in the underbrush, he realized
that the man alongside him was German. "He was young and as frightened
as I was," Heyes says, "but he used my field dressing on my ankle. A
short time later we both were wounded again by the mortar fire and we
just lay there waiting for someone to pick us up." Heyes and the young
German would remain together until well after dark, when British
stretcher-bearers found and evacuated them.

Like the 1/ Battalion, the 3rd too was pinned down. After two hours on
the road, both battalions had covered a bare two and a half miles.
Now, Colonel Fitch reached the same conclusion as Dobie on the upper
road; he too would have to find an alternate route to the Arnhem
bridge. Time was precious, and the bridge was still a good four miles
away.

In the woods around Wolfheze SS Major Sepp Krafft was convinced he was
surrounded. He estimated that the British

outnumbered his understrength battalion by twenty to one. But,
although he considered his defense "insane," he could hardly believe
the success of his blocking action. The rocket-propelled mortars had
created havoc among the British, and his men now reported that
paratroopers moving along the Utrecht-Arnhem road were halted in some
places, and at others appeared to be abandoning the main road entirely.
Krafft still believed that his was the only German unit in the area,
and he had no illusions about stopping the British for long. He was
running out of mortar ammunition and suffering heavy casualties, and
one of his lieutenants had deserted. Still, Krafft was ebullient about
"the courageous impetuosity of my young lads." The ambitious Krafft,
who would later write a fulsome self-serving report to Himmler on his
Grenadier Training and Reserve Battalion's actions, had no idea that
his "young lads" were now being bolstered by the tanks, artillery and
armored cars of Lieutenant Colonel Walter Harzer's Hohenstaufen
Division only a mile or two east of Krafft's own headquarters.

Major Freddie Gough was totally baffled. Urquhart's message summoning
him back to Division had carried no hint of what the General had in
mind. When he left the Leopard route of the 1/ Battalion, Gough
brought back with him four escort jeeps and troops of his
reconnaissance unit. Now, at Division headquarters, Urquhart's chief
of staff, Colonel Charles Mackenzie, could not enlighten him either.
The General, Mackenzie said, had gone off in search of Brigadier
Lathbury, whose headquarters was following Colonel Frost's battalion
along the southern, Lion route. Taking his escort, Gough set out once
more. Surely, someplace along the route, he would find either one
officer or the other.

General Urquhart's jeep sped down the Utrecht-Arnhem highway and turned
south off the main artery onto a side road that led him to Frost's Lion
route. Within a few minutes he caught up with the rear elements of the
2nd Battalion. They were moving single file, along both sides of the
road. Urquhart could hear firing in the distance, but it seemed to him
"there was a lack of urgency. Everyone appeared to be moving slowly."
Driving swiftly along the cobbled road, Urquhart reached Frost's
headquarters company only to discover that Frost was up with the
leading units, which had run into German opposition. "I tried to
impart a sense of urgency that I hoped would be conveyed to Frost,"
Urquhart writes, "and told them about the ill-fortune of the Recco
Squadron." Learning that Lathbury had gone up to the middle road to
see how the 3rd Battalion was doing, Urquhart retraced his route. Once
again, he and Gough would miss each other by minutes.

Reaching the rear elements of the 3rd Battalion on the Tiger route, the
General was told that Lathbury had gone forward. He followed. At a
crossroads on the Utrecht-Arnhem road, Urquhart found the Brigadier.
The area was under devastating mortar fire. "Some of these bombs were
falling with unsettling accuracy on the crossroads and in the woodland
where many of the Third Battalion were under cover," Urquhart was later
to write. "This was the first real evidence to come my way of the
speed and determination of the German reaction." * * Major General R.
E. Urquhart, C.b., D.s.o. (with Wilfred Greatorex), Arnhem, p. 40.

Taking cover in a slit trench, Urquhart and Lathbury discussed the
situation. Both officers were worried about the slow progress of the
brigade, and now the critical lack of communications was paralyzing
their own efforts to command. Lathbury was completely out of touch
with the 1/ Battalion and had only intermittent communication with
Frost. It was apparent that both were able to direct operations only
in the area where they physically happened to be. For the moment,
Lathbury's concern was to get the 3rd Battalion off the crossroads, out
of the surrounding woods and on the move again. Urquhart decided to
try to contact Division headquarters on his jeep's radio. As he neared
the vehicle, he saw it had been struck by a mortar and his signalman
was badly wounded. Although the radio set seemed undamaged, Urquhart
could not raise Division. "I cursed the appalling communications,"
Urquhart later wrote. "Lathbury dissuaded me from attempting to go
back to my own headquarters. The enemy was now thick between us and
the landing zones ... I decided he was right ... and I stayed. But it
was at this point that I realized I was losing control of the
situation."

The men of the 1/ and 3rd battalions were engaging in constant, bitter
skirmishes. Hardened and desperate Waffen SS troopers, inferior in
numbers but bolstered by half-tracks, artillery and tanks, were
reducing the British advance on the two upper roads to a crawl. In the
confusion, men were separated from their officers and from one another
as companies scattered into the woods or fought along side roads and in
the back gardens of houses. The Red Devils had recovered from the
initial surprise of the German armored strength and, though taking
heavy casualties, individually and in small groups they were striking
back tenaciously. Still, there was little chance that the 1/ and 3rd
battalions could reach their Arnhem objectives as planned. Now
everything depended upon Colonel John Frost's 2nd Battalion, moving
steadily along the lower Rhine road, the secondary route that the
Germans had largely dismissed.

Although Frost's battalion had been held up briefly several

times by enemy fire, he had refused to allow his men to scatter or
deploy. His spearheading A Company, commanded by Major Digby
Tatham-Warter, pressed forward, leaving stragglers to join the
companies coming up behind. From prisoners taken by the advance
parties, Frost learned that an SS company was believed to be covering
the western approaches of Arnhem. Using some captured transport as
well as their own jeeps to scout ahead and to the sides, the battalion
moved steadily on. A little after 6 P.m., the first of Frost's
objectives, the railway bridge over the Lower Rhine slightly southeast
of Oosterbeek, came into view. According to plan, Major Victor Dover's
C Company peeled off and headed for the river. The bridge looked empty
and undefended as they approached. Lieutenant Peter Barry, twenty-one,
was ordered to take his platoon across. "It was quiet when we started
out," Barry recalls. "As we ran across the fields I noticed that there
were dead cattle everywhere." Barry's platoon was within 300 yards of
the bridge when he saw "a German run onto the bridge from the other
side. He reached the middle, knelt down, and started doing something.
Immediately, I told one section to open fire and a second section to
rush the bridge. By this time, the German had disappeared."

Barry recalls that they "got onto the bridge and began racing across at
full speed. Suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion and the bridge
went up in our faces." Captain Eric Mackay of the Royal Engineers felt
the ground shake under the impact. "A yellow-orange flame punched up
and then black smoke rose over the bridge. I think the second span
from the south bank was blown," Mackay says. On the bridge, under
cover of smoke bombs, Lieutenant Barry ordered his men off the wreckage
and back to the northern bank. As the platoon began to move, Germans
hidden across the river opened fire. Barry was hit in the leg and arm
and two other men were wounded. Watching the troopers return through
the smoke and fire, Mackay, who had been uneasy about the operation
from the beginning, remembers thinking, "Well, there goes number one."
Colonel Frost was more

philosophical. "I knew one of the three bridges was gone, but it was
the least important. I didn't realize then what a disadvantage it
would be." It was now 6:30 P.m. and there were two more bridges to
go.

It had taken the Hohenstaufen Division engineers five hours to
reassemble all the tanks, half-tracks and armored personnel carriers
that Harzer had planned to send back to Germany. Newly decorated
Captain Paul Gr@abner, his forty-vehicle reconnaissance battalion
ready, now set out from Hoenderloo Barracks, north of Arnhem, and drove
quickly south. Harzer had instructed him to make a sweep of the area
between Arnhem and Nijmegen to assess the strength of the Allied
airborne troops in that area. Gr@abner raced swiftly through Arnhem
and, by radio, informed Hohenstaufen headquarters that the city seemed
almost deserted. There was no sign of enemy troops. A little before 7
P.m., Gr@abner's unit crossed over the great Arnhem highway bridge. A
mile past the southern end, Gr@abner stopped his car to report, "No
enemy. No paratroopers." Mile after mile, his light armored cars
slowly patrolling both sides of the highway, Gr@abner's radio messages
conveyed the same information. At Nijmegen itself the news was
unchanged. On orders of Hohenstaufen headquarters, Gr@abner was then
instructed to further patrol the outskirts of Nijmegen and then return
to headquarters.

Gr@abner's unit and the forward elements of Frost's 2nd Battalion had
missed each other by approximately an hour. Even as Gr@abner had
driven out of Arnhem, Frost's men were in the city

itself and were stealthily approaching their remaining objectives.
Inexplicably, despite General Bittrich's explicit instructions, Harzer
had completely failed to safeguard the Arnhem bridge.

It was growing dark as Colonel Frost quickened the battalion's pace
toward the next objective, the pontoon crossing less than a mile west
of the Arnhem bridge. Major Digby Tatham-Warter's A Company, still in
the lead, was again momentarily held up on the high ground at the
western outskirts of Arnhem. Enemy armored cars and machine guns had
forced the company off the road and into the back gardens of nearby
houses. Coming up behind, Frost found ten Germans guarded by a lone A
Company man and, as he was later to write, surmised that "Digby's
back-garden maneuver had been completely successful and that the
company had rushed on again." Frost returned to the battalion. In the
dusk, bursts of fire sporadically swept the road but as the men moved
along, they passed damaged vehicles and a number of dead and wounded
Germans--clear evidence, Frost thought, of "Digby's quite satisfactory
progress."

Moving rapidly through the streets of Arnhem, the battalion reached the
pontoon bridge and halted, faced with their second setback. The center
section of the bridge had been removed and it was useless. As Captain
Mackay stood looking at the dismantled crossing, he decided that "it
was typical of the whole cocked-up operation. My one thought was, "Now
we've got to get that other bloody bridge."" He stared off in the
distance. Barely a mile away, the great concrete-and-steel span was
silhouetted against the last light.

On the 3rd Battalion's Tiger route, moving haltingly toward Arnhem,
General Urquhart knew with certainty that he was stranded. In the
growing darkness, with enemy forays constantly harassing the march,
there was no possibility of his returning to Division headquarters.
His mood was bleak. "I wished with every step that I knew what was
going on elsewhere." Just before nightfall, Urquhart learned that the
3rd's leading companies had reached the outskirts of Oosterbeek "near
someplace called the Hartenstein Hotel. ... We were making little
progress," Urquhart was later to write, "and Lathbury, after a
discussion with Fitch, the battalion commander, called a halt."

In a large house set well back from the road, Urquhart and Lathbury
prepared to spend the night. The owner of the house, a tall,
middle-aged Dutchman, brushed aside the General's apologies for
inconveniencing him and his wife, and gave the two officers a
downstairs front room overlooking the main road. Urquhart was restless
and unable to relax. "I kept checking to see if any contact had been
made with either Gough or Frost, but there was nothing from my
headquarters or from anyone else."

The great bridge loomed ahead. The concrete ramps alone were immense
complexes unto themselves with roads running beneath them and along the
river bank from west to east. On either side the rooftops of houses
and factory buildings came up to the level of the ramps. In the
twilight, the massive approaches and the high-arched girders spanning
the Rhine looked awesome and intimidating. Here finally was the main
objective --the pivot of Montgomery's audacious plan --and to reach it
Frost's men had fought on the march for nearly seven hours.

Now, as lead elements of the 2nd Battalion neared the bridge,
Lieutenant Robin Vlasto, in command of one of A Company's

platoons, was amazed by "its incredible great height." Vlasto noted
"pillboxes at each end, and even in the general air of desertion, they
looked threatening." In darkness A Company quietly took up positions
beneath the huge supports at the northern end. From above them came
the slow rumble of traffic.

Captain Eric Mackay of the Royal Engineers, approaching the bridge
through a mosaic of streets, reached a small square leading to the
ramp. He remembers that "the quietness as we went through the streets
was oppressive, and all around us there seemed to be soft movement.
Men were beginning to feel the strain, and I wanted to get that bridge
as quickly as we could." Suddenly the darkness was ripped by German
fire from a side street. One of the engineers' explosives trolleys
went up in flames, and the men were clearly illuminated. Instantly,
Mackay ordered his men with their equipment across the square. They
dashed over, defying the German fire. Within a few minutes, without
losing a man, they were at the bridge. Studying the terrain below the
northern ramp, Mackay saw four houses on the east side. "One of them
was a school and it was on the corner of a crossroads," he remembers.
"I thought that whoever held these houses held the bridge." Mackay
promptly ordered his engineers into the school.

Shortly after 8 P.m., Colonel Frost and the battalion headquarters
arrived. Frost had sent Major Douglas Crawley's B Company to the high
ground above the nearby railway embankment with antitank guns to
protect the battalion's left flank, freeing A Company to dash for the
bridge. * C Company, under Major Dover, was instructed to follow the
forward elements into the city and seize the German commandant's
headquarters. Now, at the bridge, Frost was unable to raise either
company by radio. Quickly he dispatched messengers to determine their
whereabouts. * Frost recalls that "a map I had taken from a German
prisoner ... showed the routes of an enemy armored-car patrol unit and
I realized that the German strength was to my left."

Deciding not to wait, Frost ordered A Company platoons onto

the bridge. As the men began to move across, the Germans came to life.
Troopers were raked with fire from the pillbox at the northern end and
by a lone armored car on the southern end of the bridge itself. A
platoon, aided by Eric Mackay's sappers carrying flamethrowers, began
to move through the top floors of houses whose roofs and attics were at
eye level with the ramp. Simultaneously, Lieutenant Vlasto's platoon
worked its way through basements and cellars, going from house to house
until it reached Mackay's locations. In position, they attacked the
pillbox. As the flamethrowers went into action, Frost recalls that
"all hell seemed to be let loose. The sky lit up, and there was the
noise of machine-gun fire, a succession of explosions, the crackling of
burning ammunition and the thump of a cannon. A wooden building nearby
was wreathed in flames, and there were screams of agony and fear." *1
Now, too, Frost could hear the crash of Vlasto's Piat *2 bombs smashing
into the pillbox. Suddenly, the brief savage battle was over. The
guns in the pillbox fell silent and through the fires, Frost saw German
soldiers staggering toward his men. A Company had successfully cleared
the north end of the bridge and it was theirs. But now, hampering
fires and exploding ammunition made it suicidal to risk a second rush
to grab the southern side. Only half an hour earlier, Frost could have
succeeded. *3 But now, on the south bank, a group of SS Panzer
Grenadiers had taken up positions. *1 Several accounts state that the
flamethrowers' aim was diverted and instead of hitting the pillbox, the
fiery liquid hit several huts containing explosives. *2 A short-range,
spring-loaded British antitank gun weighing 33 pounds and capable of
firing a projectile that could penetrate four inches of tempered armor
plate. *3 According to Dutch Police Sergeant Johannes van Kuijk the
bridge was deserted and without guards when he came on duty at 7:30
that evening. Earlier, according to Van Kuijk, when the airborne
landings began, the bridge garrison of twenty-five World War I veterans
deserted their post.

Frost attempted to contact Major Crawley once more. He wanted to
locate boats or barges in which Crawley's company could cross the river
and attack the Germans on the southern side. Again, radio
communications were out. Worse, messengers could not even find the
company; and, they reported, there were

no boats to be seen. As for C Company, the patrol sent out to contact
them were pinned down and heavily engaged near the German commandant's
headquarters.

Grimly Frost's men looked across the Arnhem bridge. How strong were
the Germans holding the southern end? Even now, A Company believed
there was a chance of seizing the southern end by a surprise attack
across the river, if only the men and boats could be found.

But that opportunity had passed. In one of the great ironies of the
Arnhem battle, the Lower Rhine could have been crossed within the first
hour of landing. Exactly seven miles west, at the village of
Heveadorp--through which Frost's battalion had marched en route to
their objectives--a large cable ferry, capable of carrying automobiles
and passengers, had operated back and forth all day on its normal
passage across the Lower Rhine between Heveadorp on the north bank and
Driel on the south. Frost knew nothing about the ferry. Nor was it
ever listed as one of Urquhart's objectives. In the meticulous
planning of Market-Garden an important key to the taking of the Arnhem
bridge --the ferry at Driel--had been totally overlooked. * * In the
official orders issued to Urquhart, no reference to the Driel ferry as
an objective seems to exist. R.a.f. reconnaissance photographs, used
at briefings, show it clearly and one must assume that at some stage of
the planning it was discussed. However, General Urquhart, when I
interviewed him on the subject, told me "I can't recall that the ferry
ever came up." When Urquhart finally learned of the ferry's existence,
it was too late to be of any use. Says Urquhart, "By that time I did
not have enough men to put across the river." In oral orders, however,
the engineers were warned that "the seizure of all ferries, barges and
tugs becomes of paramount importance to assist the subsequent advance
of XXX Corps." Obviously, however, in the last-minute stages of the
planning these orders apparently carried lower priority, for they were
never formally issued. "No one told us about the ferry at Driel,"
Colonel Frost told the author, "and it could have made all the
difference."

Major Freddie Gough had finally overtaken Lathbury's brigade
headquarters, following Frost's battalion on the Lion route. Quickly
he sought out Major Tony Hibbert, the second in com-

mand. "Where's the General and the Brigadier?" Gough asked. Hibbert
didn't know. "They're together someplace," he told Gough, "but they've
both gone off." Gough was now totally confused. "I didn't know what
to do," he recalls. "I tried to contact Division without success, so I
just decided to keep on going after Frost." Leaving Hibbert, Gough set
out once more.

It was dark when Gough and his troopers drove into Arnhem and found
Frost and his men holding positions near the northern end of the
bridge. Immediately Gough asked where Urquhart was. Like Hibbert,
Frost had no idea. He assumed Urquhart was back with Division. Once
more Gough tried his radio. Now adding to his anxiety was the absence
of any news of his own reconnaissance forces near Wolfheze. But again
he could make no contact with anyone. Ordering his tired men to a
building close by the bridge, Gough climbed to the roof just in time to
see the whole southern end of the bridge "go up in flames" as Frost's
men made their first attempt to seize the far end. "I heard this
tremendous explosion and the whole end of the bridge seemed to be on
fire. I remember somebody saying "We've come all this way just to have
the damn bridge burn down."" Gough himself was momentarily alarmed.
Then, through the smoke he saw that only the pillbox and some
ammunition shacks were destroyed. Concerned and weary, Gough turned in
for a few hours' rest. He had traveled route after route all day in
search of Urquhart. Now, at the bridge, at least one problem was
solved. He was where he had set out to be and there he would stay.

There was little more that Lieutenant Colonel Frost could do this
night, except to guard the northern end of the bridge from enemy
attacks on the southern side. He still had no contact with his missing
companies and now, in a house on a corner overlooking the bridge, Frost
set up battalion headquarters. Lance Corporal Harold Back of the 2nd
Battalion's cipher section remembers that from the front window of the
house, the headquarters

personnel could look out on the ramp. "The side window of the room
gave us a direct view of the bridge itself," says Back. "Our signalers
stuck their antennas through the roof and moved their sets constantly,
but they couldn't make contact with anybody."

Shortly after, Brigade headquarters arrived and set up in the attic of
a house near Frost's. After conferring with his officers, Frost
thought it was now obvious that the 1/ and 3rd battalions had either
been held up on the Tiger and Leopard routes or were fighting north of
the bridge somewhere in Arnhem. Without communications, it was
impossible to tell what had happened. But if the two battalions did
not reach Arnhem during the hours of darkness, the Germans would have
the precious time necessary to close the area between Frost's men and
the rest of the division. Additionally, Frost was worried that the
great bridge might still be blown. In the opinion of the engineers,
the heat from fires had already destroyed any fuses laid from the
bridge to the town and all visible cables had already been cut by
sappers. Still, no one knew exactly where other cables might be
hidden. And, as Frost recalls, "the fires prevented even one man from
being able to get on to the bridge to remove any charges that might
still be there."

But the northern end of the Arnhem bridge was in Frost's hands and he
and his courageous men had no intention of giving it up. Although he
worried about his missing companies and the rest of the division, he
did not show his concern. Visiting various sections now billeted in
several houses near the ramp, he found his men "in great heart, as they
had every reason to be." As Private James Sims recalls, "We felt quite
pleased with ourselves, with the Colonel making jokes and inquiring
about our comfort."

At battalion headquarters, Frost himself now settled down for the first
time during the day. Sipping from a large mug of tea, he thought that,
all in all, the situation was not too bad. "We had come eight miles
through close, difficult country, to capture our objective within seven
hours of landing in Holland ... a very fine feat of arms indeed."
Although restless, Frost, like his men, was optimistic. He now had a
force numbering about five hundred men of various units, and he had
every faith that his own missing companies would reach him at 278-280
the bridge. In any case, he would only have to hold, at most, for
another forty-eight hours-- until the tanks of General Horrocks' XXX
Corps arrived.

From Berlin to the western front, the German high command was stunned
by the sudden Allied attack. Only in Arnhem, where the British 1/
Airborne Division had dropped almost on top of General Bittrich's two
panzer divisions, was the reaction both fierce and quick. Elsewhere,
baffled and confused commanders tried to determine whether the
startling events of September 17 were indeed the opening phase of an
invasion of the Reich. A ground attack by the British out of Belgium
had been anticipated. All available reserves, including General Von
Zangen's Fifteenth Army, so worn down that men had little else but the
rifles they carried, had been thrown into defense positions to hold
against that threat. Trenches had been dug and strategic positions
built in an all-out effort to force the British to fight for every foot
of ground.

No one had foreseen that airborne forces would be used simultaneously
with the British land advance. were these airborne attacks the prelude
to an invasion of Holland by sea, as Berlin feared? In the hours of
darkness, while staff officers tried to analyze the situation, reports
of additional airborne attacks further confused the picture. American
paratroopers, their strength unknown and their units still
unidentified, were in the Eindhoven-Nijmegen area; and the British 1/
Airborne Division had clearly landed around Arnhem. But now new
messages told of para-

troopers in the vicinity of Utrecht, and a totally bewildering report
claimed that airborne forces had landed in Warsaw, Poland. * * The
R.a.f. did drop dummy paratroops over a wide area around Utrecht,
diverting some German troops for days. No troops were dropped on
Warsaw and the report may have been garbled in transmission or, more
simply, may have been the result of unfounded rumor.

At Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt's headquarters in Koblenz, the
general reaction was one of astonishment. * The crusty, aristocratic
Von Rundstedt was not so much surprised at the nature of the attack as
by the man who, he reasoned, must be directing it--Montgomery.
Initially, Von Rundstedt doubted that these sudden and apparently
combined land-and-air operations were the opening of Eisenhower's
offensive to invade the Reich. The Field Marshal had long been certain
that Patton and the American Third Army driving toward the Saar posed
the real danger. To combat that threat, Von Rundstedt had committed
his best troops to repulse Patton's racing tanks. Now Germany's most
renowned soldier was caught temporarily off balance. Never had he
expected Eisenhower's main offensive to be led by Montgomery, whom he
had always considered "overly cautious, habit-ridden and systematic."
* "When we first informed Von Rundstedt's headquarters of the airborne
attack," Colonel Hans von Tempelhof, Model's operations chief, told me,
"OB West seemed hardly perturbed. In fact the reaction was almost
callously normal. It quickly changed."

He was astounded by the boldness of Montgomery's move. The messages
pouring in from Model's headquarters carried a note of hysteria
attesting all the more to the surprise and gravity of the attack: "We
must reckon with more airborne landings being made at night ... the
enemy obviously believes his attack to be of major importance and the
British have achieved considerable initial success against Student and
pushed forward to Valkenswaard ... the position here is particularly
critical ... the lack of fast, strong reserves is increasing our
difficulties ... the general situation of Army Group B, stretched as it
is to the limits, is critical ... we require, as fast as possible,
panzers, artillery, heavy mobile antitank weapons, antiaircraft units,
and it is

absolutely essential that we have fighters in the sky day and night
..."

Model ended with these words: "... the main concentration of the Allies
is on the northern wing of our front." It was one of the few times Von
Rundstedt had ever respected the opinion of the officer he had
caustically referred to as having the makings of a good sergeant major.
In that fragment of his message, Model had stripped away Von
Rundstedt's last doubts about who was responsible for the startling
developments. The "northern wing" of Army Group B was Montgomery.

During the night hours it was impossible to estimate the strength of
the Allied airborne forces in Holland, but Von Rundstedt was convinced
that further landings could be expected. It would now be necessary not
only to plug gaps all along the German front but to find reserves for
Model's Army Group B at the same time. Once again, Von Rundstedt was
forced to gamble. Messages went out from his headquarters transferring
units from their positions facing the Americans at Aachen. The moves
were risky but essential. These units would have to travel north
immediately, and their commitment in the line might take forty-eight
hours at minimum. Von Rundstedt issued further orders to defense areas
along Germany's northwest frontier, calling for all available armor and
antiaircraft units to proceed to the quiet backwater of Holland where,
the Field Marshal was now convinced, imminent danger to the Third Reich
lay. Even as he worked steadily on through the night to shore up his
defenses, Germany's Iron Knight pondered the strangeness of the
situation. He was still amazed that the officer in charge of this
great Allied offensive was Montgomery.

It was late evening when the staff car carrying General Wilhelm
Bittrich from his headquarters at Doetinchem arrived in the darkened
streets of Arnhem. Bittrich was determined to see for himself what was
happening. As he reconnoitered through the

city, fires were still burning and debris littered the streets--the
effect of the morning's bombing. Dead soldiers and smoldering vehicles
in many areas attested, as Bittrich was later to say, to "the turbulent
fighting that had taken place." Yet, he had no clear picture of what
was happening. Returning to his own headquarters, Bittrich learned
from reports received from two women telephone operators in the Arnhem
Post headquarters--whom he was later to decorate with the Iron
Cross--that the great highway bridge had been taken by British
paratroopers. Bittrich was infuriated. His specific order to Harzer
to hold the bridge had not been carried out. Now it was crucial that
the Nijmegen bridge over the Waal river be secured before the Americans
in the south could seize it. Bittrich's only chance of success was to
crush the Allied assault along the corridor and squeeze the British to
a standstill in the Arnhem area. The paratroopers now on the north end
of the Arnhem bridge and the scattered battalions struggling to reach
them must be totally destroyed.

The top-secret Market-Garden plan that had fallen into Colonel General
Kurt Student's possession finally reached Field Marshal Model at his
new headquarters. He had abandoned the gardener's cottage on the
Doetinchem castle grounds and moved about five miles southeast near the
small village of Terborg. It had taken Student the best part of ten
hours to locate the Field Marshal and transmit the document by radio.
Arriving in three parts and now decoded, Market-Garden lay revealed.

Model and his staff studied it intently. Before them was Montgomery's
entire plan: the names of the airborne divisions employed, the
successive air and resupply lifts ranging over a three-day period, the
exact location of the landing and drop zones, the crucial bridge
objectives --even the flight routes of the aircraft involved. Model,
as Harzer was later to learn from the Field Marshal himself, called the
plan "fantastic." It was so fantastic that in these critical hours
Model refused to believe it.

The plans were too pat, too detailed for credibility. Model suggested
to his staff that the very preciseness of the document argued against
its authenticity. He stressed again his own firm conviction that the
landings west of Arnhem were the spearhead of a large-scale airborne
attack toward the Ruhr, via Bocholt and M`unster, some forty miles
east. Additional airborne landings should be expected, he warned, and
once assembled would undoubtedly swerve north and then east. Model's
reasoning was not without validity. As he told his staff, "If we are
to believe these plans and are to assume that the Arnhem bridge is the
true objective, why were not troops dropped directly on the bridge?
Here, they arrive on vast open areas suitable for assembly, and
moreover, eight miles to the west."

Model did not inform General Bittrich of the document. "I never
realized until after the war," says Bittrich, "that the Market-Garden
plans had fallen into our hands. I have no idea why Model did not tell
me. In any case, the plans would simply have confirmed my own opinion
that the important thing to do was prevent the link-up between the
airborne troops and the British Second Army--and for that, they
certainly needed the bridges." * One officer under Bittrich's command
did learn of the document. Lieutenant Colonel Harzer seemed to be the
only officer outside the Field Marshal's staff with whom Model talked
about the plan. Harzer recalls that "Model was always prepared for the
worst, so he did not discount it entirely. As he told me, he had no
intention of being caught by the short hairs." Only time would tell
the Germans whether the document was, in fact, genuine. Although the
temperamental, erratic Field Marshal was not fully prepared to accept
the evidence before him, most of his staff were impressed. With the
Market-Garden plan in their hands, Model's headquarters alerted all
antiaircraft units already on the move of the drops that the plan said
would take place a few hours later. * OB West was not informed of the
captured Market-Garden plans either; nor is there any mention in
Model's reports to Von Rundstedt of the documents. For some reason
Model thought so little of the plans that he did not pass them on to
higher headquarters.

One assumption, at least, was laid to rest. Lieutenant Gustav

Sedelhauser, the general-headquarters administrative officer, recalls
that on the basis of the captured documents, Model was now of the
opinion that he and his Oosterbeek headquarters had not been the
objective of the airborne

assault after all.

At the precise time that Lieutenant Colonel John Frost secured the
northern end of the Arnhem bridge, a cautious approach to another prime
objective eleven miles away was only just beginning. The five-span
highway bridge over the Waal river at Nijmegen in the 82nd Airborne's
central sector of the corridor was the last crossing over which the
tanks of General Horrocks' XXX Corps would pass on their drive to
Arnhem.

With spectacular success, Brigadier General James M. Gavin's 504th
paratroopers had grabbed the crucial Grave bridge eight miles southwest
of Nijmegen; and, at about 7:30 P.m., units of the 504th and 505th
regiments secured a crossing over the Maas-Waal Canal at the village of
Heumen, less than five miles due east of Grave. Gavin's hope of
capturing all three canal crossings and a railroad bridge was in vain.
The bridges were blown or severely damaged by the Germans before the
82nd could grab them. Yet, within six hours of landing, Gavin's
troopers had forged a route over which the British ground forces would
travel. Additionally, patrols of the 505th Regiment probing the area
between the 82nd's drop zones near the Groesbeek Heights and the
Reichswald encountered only light resistance; and, by nightfall, other
troopers of the 508th Regiment had secured a 3-astb-mile stretch of
woods along the Holland-German border north of the Groesbeek

drop zone and running to the southeastern outskirts of Nijmegen. Now,
with three of the 82nd's four key objectives in hand, everything
depended upon the capture of the 1,960-foot-long road bridge at
Nijmegen.

Although General Browning had directed Gavin not to go for the Nijmegen
crossing until the high ground around Groesbeek was secured, Gavin was
confident that all the 82nd's objectives could be taken on this first
day. Evaluating the situation some twenty-four hours before the jump,
Gavin had called in the 508th's commander, Colonel Roy E. Lindquist,
and directed him to send one battalion racing for the bridge. In the
surprise and confusion of the airborne landings, Gavin reasoned, the
gamble was well worth taking. "I cautioned Lindquist about the dangers
of getting caught in streets," Gavin remembers, "and pointed out that
the way to get the bridge was to approach from east of the city without
going through built-up areas." Whether by misunderstanding or a desire
to clean up his initial assignments, Lindquist's own recollection was
that he was not to commit his troopers in an assault on the bridge
until the regiment's other objectives had been achieved. To the 1/
Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Shields Warren, Jr.,
Lindquist assigned the task of holding protective positions along the
Groesbeek-Nijmegen highway about a mile and a quarter southeast of the
city. Warren was to defend the area and link up with the regiment's
remaining two battalions to the west and east. Only when these
missions were accomplished, Warren recalled, was he to prepare to go
into Nijmegen. Thus, instead of driving for the bridge from the flat
farming areas to the east, Warren's battalion found itself squarely in
the center of those very built-up areas Gavin had sought to avoid.

It was nightfall before Warren achieved his other objectives. Now with
precious time lost, lead companies began to move slowly through the
quiet, almost deserted streets of Nijmegen. The main objective was to
reach the traffic circle leading to the southern approaches of the
bridge. There was a diversionary target as well. The Dutch
underground reported that the detonat-

+ mechanism for destroying the great crossing was situated in the main
post-office building. This vital information reached Warren's units
only after they had begun moving toward the bridge. A platoon was
hurriedly sent to the post office, where, after subduing the German
guards, engineers cut wires and blew up what they believed to be the
detonating controls. Whether this apparatus was, in fact, actually
hooked up to explosives on the bridge, no one would ever know for
certain, but now, at least, electrical circuits and switchboards were
destroyed. When the platoon attempted to withdraw to rejoin the main
force they found that the enemy had closed in behind them. They were
cut off and for the next three days would be forced to hold out in the
post office until help arrived.

Meanwhile, as the remainder of Warren's force approached a park that
led toward the bridge, they came suddenly under intense machine-gun and
armored-car fire. Captain Arie D. Bestebreurtje, the Dutch officer
assigned to the 82nd, remembers that "guns suddenly opened up on us,
and I could see the flashes of fire from the muzzles. They seemed to
be all around us." Before he could raise his carbine to fire,
Bestebreurtje was hit in the left hand and elbow and the right index
finger. * To Corporal James R. Blue, the eerie battle raging in the
blacked-out streets was like a nightmare. "Right away we were engaged
in hand-to-hand combat," Blue remembers. He was moving through the
streets with Private First Class Ray Johnson, both armed with M-1
rifles with fixed bayonets, when they came face to face with SS troops.
As Johnson tried to get one of the Germans with his bayonet, Blue went
after an officer with a trench knife. "Our orders were not to fire.
If we came to close combat we were to use knives and bayonets. But,"
Blue recalls, "that trench knife seemed mighty short, so I used my
Tommy gun. That closed that chapter, but almost immediately a
self-propelled gun began to fire in our direction and we moved up to
the park and tied in with other * Several days later, Bestebreurtje was
told by doctors that the finger must be amputated. "I told them
absolutely not," Bestebreurtje says. "It was my finger and I was not
going to have it amputated. Besides, it would have ruined my piano
playing." He still has the finger.

platoons." Private James Allardyce remembers hearing a call for medics
up front, but "bullets were whistling down the street and there was so
much confusion in the darkness that men did not know where others were.
We set up a perimeter defense around a modern brick schoolhouse. Out
front we heard German voices and the moaning and cries of the wounded.
We couldn't make it to the bridge. Finally it came through to us that
the Jerries had stopped us."

As indeed they had. Captain Paul Gr@abner's Reconnaissance Battalion,
which had missed Frost at the Arnhem bridge, had arrived in Nijmegen
well in advance of the late-starting Americans.

By midnight on this first day of the mightiest airborne assault in
history, British and American paratroops were on, or fighting toward,
their major objectives. Through long hours of march and savage
encounters with an unexpectedly strong and tenacious enemy, they had
gained most of the objectives that the planners had expected them to
take swiftly and with ease. From the gallant men of Colonel John
Frost's 2nd Battalion clinging to the north end of the Arnhem bridge,
all along the corridor south to where Colonel Robert Sink's 101/
troopers struggled to repair the bridge at Son, the mood was one of
fierce determination; they must hold open the highway along which the
British Second Army tanks and infantry would drive. On this midnight,
troopers did not doubt that relief was on the way or that
reinforcements and supplies, scheduled to arrive on the eighteenth,
would further bolster their position. Despite heavy casualties,
confusion, and communications setbacks, the men of the airborne army
were completely optimistic. All in all, it had not been a bad Sunday
outing.

There was a red glow in the sky over Arnhem as the speeding car
bringing Major General Heinz Harmel back from Berlin neared the city.
Apprehensive and tired after the long trip, Harmel arrived at the
Frundsberg Division headquarters in Ruurlo, only to find that his
command post was now situated in Velp, approximately three miles
northeast of Arnhem. There, he found his chief of staff, Lieutenant
Colonel Paetsch, looking exhausted. "Thank God you're back!" Paetsch
said. Quickly he briefed Harmel on the day's events and on the orders
received from General Bittrich. "I was dumfounded," Harmel recalls.
"Everything seemed confused and uncertain. I was very tired, yet the
gravity of the situation was such that I called Bittrich and told him I
was coming to see him."

Bittrich had not slept either. As Harmel was shown in, Bittrich began
immediately to outline the situation. Angry and frustrated, he bent
over his maps. "British paratroopers have landed here, west of
Arnhem," he told Harmel. "We have no idea of their actual strength or
intentions." Pointing to Nijmegen and Eindhoven, the corps commander
said, "American airborne forces have secured lodgments in these two
areas. Simultaneously, Montgomery's forces have attacked north from
the Meuse-Escaut Canal. My belief is that the object is to split our
forces. In my opinion, the objectives are the bridges. Once these are
secured, Montgomery can drive directly up to the center of Holland and
from there, into the Ruhr." Bittrich waved his hands. "Model
disagrees. He still believes further airborne forces will be

dropped north of the Rhine, east and west of Arnhem and march toward
the Ruhr."

Harzer's Hohenstaufen Division, Bittrich went on to explain, had been
ordered to mop up the British west and north of Arnhem. The armed
forces commander in the Netherlands, General Christiansen, had been
directed to send in his forces--a mixture of defense and training
battalions--under command of Lieutenant General Hans von Tettau. Their
mission was to aid the Hohenstaufen Division on the flanks in an effort
to overrun the British landing and drop zones.

The Frundsberg Division, Bittrich continued, was charged with all
activities to the east of Arnhem and south to Nijmegen. Stabbing the
map with his finger, Bittrich told Harmel, "The Nijmegen bridge must be
held at all costs. Additionally the Arnhem bridge and the area all the
way south to Nijmegen is your responsibility." Bittrich paused and
paced the room. "Your problems," he told Harmel, "have been made more
difficult. Harzer failed to leave armored units at the north end of
the Arnhem bridge. The British are now there."

As he listened, Harmel realized with growing alarm that with the Arnhem
bridge in British hands, there was no way to get his armor quickly
across the Rhine and down to Nijmegen. Nor was there another bridge
crossing over the river east of the Arnhem bridge. His entire division
would have to be taken over the Rhine at a ferry landing in the village
of Pannerden, some eight miles southeast of Arnhem. Bittrich,
anticipating the problem, had already ordered the ferry operations to
begin. It would be a slow, tedious, roundabout way of reaching
Nijmegen, and to ferry the division's trucks, armor and men would take
all of Harmel's resources.

As he left Bittrich's headquarters, Harmel asked his commander, "Why
not destroy the Nijmegen bridge before it's too late?" Bittrich's tone
was ironic. "Model has flatly refused to consider the idea. We may
need it to counterattack." Harmel stared in amazement. "With what?"
he asked.

In the dark, Harmel set out once again, heading for Pannerden. His
units were already on the move toward the ferry crossing and the roads
were choked with troops and vehicles. In Pannerden itself, Harmel saw
the reason for the chaotic conditions he had witnessed on the road.
Vehicles congested the streets in one gigantic traffic jam. At the
river's edge, makeshift ferries composed of rubber rafts were slowly
floating trucks across the river. From his chief of staff, Harmel
learned that one battalion had reached the far shore and was already en
route to Nijmegen. Some trucks and smaller vehicles were also across.
But as yet, heavier armored equipment had not even been loaded. In
Paetsch's opinion, Harmel's Frundsberg units might not be in action in
the Arnhem-Nijmegen area until September 24 if the slow, cumbersome
ferrying could not be speeded up.

Harmel knew there was only one solution to the problem. He would have
to retake the Arnhem bridge and open the highway route to Nijmegen. As
this first day of Market-Garden, September 17, ended all the German
frustrations now focused on a single obstinate man--Colonel John Frost
at the Arnhem bridge.

Part Four 293-323 THE SIEGE

Early morning mist rising from the Rhine swirled around the Arnhem
bridge and the silent darkened houses surrounding it. A short distance
from the northern ramp, the Eusebius Buiten Singel--a long, landscaped
boulevard bordering the historic inner city--stretched back toward the
outlying areas north and east and ended at the Musis Sacrum, Arnhem's
popular concert hall. On this Monday, September 18, in the thin,
indistinct light, the ancient capital of Gelderland appeared deserted.
Nothing moved in the streets, gardens, squares or parks.

From their positions around the northern end of the bridge, Colonel
Frost's men could begin to see for the first time the whole sprawl of
the city with its houses and municipal buildings: the Court of Justice,
Provincial Government House, State Archives buildings, the town hall,
general post office and the railroad station less than a mile to the
northwest. Nearer, the Church of St. Eusebius, with its 305-foot-high
steeple, dominated the city. Few of Frost's men, looking warily out
from shattered windows and freshly dug foxholes in a perimeter composed
of eighteen houses, realized that the great church now had a sinister
significance. German snipers had moved into the tower during the
night. Carefully concealed, they, like the British, waited tensely for
full light.

The battle for the bridge had raged all night. A midnight lull had
been short-lived. When the fighting broke out again, it almost

seemed that each man was engaged in individual contest. Twice during
the night Frost's men had tried to rush the southern end of the bridge,
only to be beaten back. Lieutenant John Grayburn, leading both
charges, had been badly wounded in the face, but stayed on the bridge
and oversaw the evacuation of all his men to safety. * Later,
truckloads of German infantry tried to ram their way across the bridge,
only to be met by the concentrated fire of the British troopers. With
flamethrowers, Frost's men had set the vehicles on fire. Panzer
Grenadiers were burned alive in the inferno and fell screaming to the
Rhine one hundred feet below. The acrid smell of burning rubber and
thick black smoke eddying up from the debris hampered rescue parties
from both sides searching for their wounded among the bodies littering
the bridge. Lance Corporal Harold Back, in one such party, was helping
to carry wounded into the basement of one of the houses held by Frost's
men. In the darkness of the cellar, he saw what he thought were a few
candles burning. Injured troopers were laid out all over the floor and
suddenly Back realized that what he saw were tiny fragments glowing on
the bodies of some of the wounded. Hit by splinters from phosphorous
shells, the men were glowing in the dark. * Grayburn was killed in the
battle for Arnhem. On Septemher 20 he stood in full view of an enemy
tank and directed the withdrawal of his men to a main defense
perimeter. For supreme courage, leadership and devotion to duty during
the entire engagement, he was posthumously awarded Britain's highest
military honor, the Victoria Cross.

Inexplicably, in these first moments of daylight, the battle halted
again. It was almost as though both sides were drawing a deep breath.
Across the road from Frost's battalion headquarters, on a side street
under the ramp itself, Captain Eric Mackay made a quiet reconnaissance
of the houses that his little force of engineers and small groups of
men from other units now controlled. During a vicious nighttime
battle, Mackay had managed to hang on to two of the four houses in the
area and set up a command post in one of them, a brick schoolhouse.
The Germans, counter-attacking, had crept through the landscaped
grounds to toss hand grenades into the houses. Infiltrating the
buildings, the Germans

fought a deadly, almost silent hand-to-hand battle with the British.
Ranging through the cellars and from room to room, Mackay's men drove
back swarms of the enemy with bayonets and knives. Then, taking a
small group of men, Mackay went out into the bushes after the
retreating Germans. Again, with bayonets and grenades, the British
routed the enemy. Mackay was hit in the legs by shrapnel and a bullet
punctured his helmet, grazing his scalp.

Now, checking his troopers, Mackay discovered casualties similar to his
own. Adding to his problems, the supply situation was not good. There
were six Bren guns, ammunition, grenades and some explosives. But
Mackay had no antitank weapons, little food and no medical supplies
except morphia and field dressings. Additionally, the Germans had cut
off the water. Now, all that was available was what the men still had
in their canteens.

Terrible as the nighttime fighting had been, Mackay maintained a fierce
determination. "We were doing well and our casualties were
comparatively light," he recalls. "Besides, now with the coming of
daylight, we could see what we were doing and we were ready." Still,
Mackay, like Frost, had few illusions. In this most deadly kind of
fighting--street by street, house by house and room by room--he knew it
was only a question of time before the British garrison at the bridge
was overwhelmed. The Germans obviously hoped to crush Frost's small
force, by sheer weight of numbers, within a matter of hours. Against
such powerful and concentrated attacks, all that could save the
courageous defenders at the bridge was the arrival of XXX Corps or the
remaining battalions of the 1/ Parachute Brigade still fighting their
way into the city.

It had been a night of unceasing horror for the SS soldiers who fought
near the bridge. Colonel Harzer, apparently satisfied that he had
halted Urquhart's battalions, had underestimated both the number and
the caliber of the men who had reached the northern

end. Harzer did not even bother to order his few self-propelled guns
to be brought up as support. Instead, squad after squad of SS were
thrown against the British positions in the buildings around the ramp.
These tough units met a foe most of them remember as the fiercest
soldiers they had ever encountered.

SS Squad Leader Alfred Ringsdorf, twenty-one, an experienced soldier
who had fought in Russia, was on a freight train heading toward Arnhem
where, he was told, his group was to be refitted. There was utter
confusion at the Arnhem station when Ringsdorf and his men arrived.
Troops from a hodgepodge of units were milling about, being lined up
and marched off. Ringsdorf's unit was told to report immediately to a
command post in the city. There, a major attached them to a company of
the 21/ Panzer Grenadier Regiment. The squad had arrived without arms,
but by late Sunday afternoon they were outfitted with machine guns,
carbines, hand grenades and a few Panzerf@auste. * Questioning the
limited amount of ammunition, they were told that supplies were en
route. "At this time," says Ringsdorf, "I had no idea where we were
going to fight, where the battle was, and I had never been in Arnhem
before." * A German version of the American recoilless antitank
bazooka capable of firing a 20-pound projectile with extreme
accuracy.

In the center of the city, there was evidence that heavy street
fighting had already taken place. For the first time, Ringsdorf
learned that British paratroopers had landed and were holding the
northern end of the Arnhem bridge. No one seemed to know how large the
force was. His squad was assembled in a church and given their orders.
They were to infiltrate behind the buildings on either side of the
bridge ramp and rout out the British. Ringsdorf knew how deadly this
kind of fighting was. His experiences at the Russian front had taught
him that. Yet, the men in his command were seasoned young veterans.
They thought the battle would be brief.

All through the area leading to the bridge, the squad saw houses
heavily damaged by bombing, and the men had to work their way through
the rubble. As they neared the perimeter

positions the British had set up around the north end of the bridge,
they came under intense machine-gun fire. Pinned down, the squad was
unable to get within six hundred yards of the bridge approach. A
lieutenant called for a volunteer to cross the square and toss a
demolition charge into the house where the heaviest machine-gun fire
seemed to be centered. Ringsdorf volunteered. Under covering fire, he
dashed across the square. "I stopped behind a tree near a cellar
window where the shooting was coming from and tossed the charge inside.
Then I ran back to my men." Lying in rubble waiting for the explosion
to go off, Ringsdorf looked back just as a tall house on a corner,
where a number of German engineers were sheltering, was suddenly hit by
shells. The entire front of the house crumbled, burying everybody. It
struck Ringsdorf that had his own men been there, the entire squad
would have been wiped out. At that moment, the demolition charge he
had thrown into the cellar exploded on the street not far from where he
lay. The British had tossed it back out the window.

At nightfall various squads began to infiltrate the buildings to dig
the British out. Ringsdorf's objective was a big red building which,
he was told, was a school. Heading toward it, his squad quickly
encountered alert British marksmen who forced the Germans to take
refuge in a nearby house. Smashing the windows, the SS men opened
fire. The British immediately took cover in the house next door and a
vicious fire fight began. "The British shooting was deadly," Ringsdorf
recalls. "We could hardly show ourselves. They aimed for the head,
and men began to fall beside me, each one with a small, neat hole
through the forehead."

With losses mounting, the Germans fired a panzerfaust directly at the
British-occupied house. As the shell crashed into the building,
Ringsdorf's squad charged. "The fighting was cruel," he remembers.
"We pushed them back room by room, yard by yard, suffering terrible
losses." In the middle of the melee, the young squad leader was
ordered to report to his battalion commander; the British, he was told,
must be driven out at all costs. Back with his men, Ringsdorf ordered
the squad to dash forward, lobbing

showers of grenades to keep the English under constant attack. "Only
in this way," says Ringsdorf, "were we able to gain ground and continue
our advance. But I certainly had not expected when I came from Germany
to find myself suddenly engaged in bitter fighting in a restricted
area. This was a harder battle than any I had fought in Russia. It
was constant, close-range, hand-to-hand fighting. The English were
everywhere. The streets, for the most part, were narrow, sometimes not
more than fifteen feet wide, and we fired at each other from only yards
away. We fought to gain inches, cleaning out one room after the other.
It was absolute hell!"

Advancing cautiously toward one house, Ringsdorf caught a glimpse of an
English helmet with camouflage netting momentarily outlined in an open
cellar doorway. As he raised his arm to throw a grenade, he heard a
low voice and the sound of moaning. Ringsdorf did not lob the grenade.
Silently he moved down the cellar steps, then yelled, "Hands up." The
command was unnecessary. In Ringsdorf's words, "Before me was a
frightening sight. The cellar was a charnel house full of wounded
English soldiers." Ringsdorf spoke soothingly, knowing that the
British would not understand his words, but might comprehend his
meaning. "It's O.k.," he told the wounded men. "It's all right." He
called for medics and, collecting his prisoners, ordered the British
moved back of his own lines for attention.

As the troopers were brought out of the cellar, Ringsdorf began to
search one of the walking wounded. To his astonishment, the man
uttered a low moan and crumpled at Ringsdorf's feet, dead. "It was a
bullet meant for me," Ringsdorf says. "The English were protecting
their own. They couldn't know we were trying to save their wounded.
But for one moment, I was paralyzed. Then I broke out in a cold sweat
and ran."

As the British troopers hung on grimly around the school, Ringsdorf
knew that even his elite unit was not strong enough to force a
surrender. As dawn broke on Monday, he and the depleted squad
retreated back up the Eusebius Buiten Singel. Encountering an
artillery commander, Ringsdorf told him that

"the only way to get the British out is to blast the buildings down,
brick by brick. Believe me, these are real men. They won't give up
that bridge until we carry them out feet first."

Master Sergeant Emil Petersen had good reason to reach the same
conclusion. He was attached to the Reichsarbeitsdienst (reich Work
Service) and, as Germany's manpower shortage became increasingly acute,
Petersen and his thirty-five-man platoon had been transferred to a
heavy antiaircraft unit, then to an infantry outfit. They had
retreated all the way from France.

On Sunday afternoon, waiting at the Arnhem station for transportation
back to Germany where they were to be reorganized, Petersen's platoon
had been mobilized and told by a lieutenant that they were to be
committed against British airborne troops who had landed in the city.
"The unit we joined consisted of 250 men," Petersen recalls. "No one
had any weapons. Only I and four others had machine pistols."

Petersen's men were tired. They had been without food for twenty-four
hours, and the sergeant remembers thinking that had the train been on
time, the platoon would have been fed, would have missed the battle and
would have reached home in Germany.

At an SS barracks, the group was issued weapons. "The situation was
laughable," Petersen says. "First, none of us liked fighting with the
Waffen SS. They had a reputation for being merciless. The arms they
gave us were ancient carbines. To break open mine, I had to bang it
against a table. The morale of my men was not exactly high when they
saw these old weapons."

It took some time to make the guns serviceable and, as yet, the unit
had not received any orders. Nobody seemed to know what was happening
or where the men were to be committed.

Finally, at dusk, the group was marched off to the town commander's
headquarters. Arriving, they found the building deserted. Again, they
waited. "All we could think about was food," says Petersen.
Eventually, an SS lieutenant arrived and announced that the men were to
push through the center of the city to the Rhine bridge.

The unit marched in platoons down Markt Street toward the Rhine. In
the dark they could see nothing; but, Petersen recalls, "we were
conscious of movement all around us. Occasionally we heard shooting in
the distance and the sound of vehicles. Once or twice I thought I saw
the dull silhouette of a helmet."

Less than three hundred yards from the bridge, Petersen was aware that
they were passing through lines of soldiers and he guessed the group he
was with must be replacing these men. Then one of the soldiers said
something that, to Petersen, was unintelligible. Instantly Petersen
realized that the man had spoken English. "We were marching alongside
a British unit heading, like us, for the bridge." The mistaken
identity was suddenly apparent to everyone. An English voice yelled
out, "They're Jerries!" Petersen remembers shouting, "Fire!"

Within seconds the street reverberated with machine-gun and rifle fire
as the two forces fought face to face. A stream of bullets missed
Petersen by inches, ripping through his knapsack. The force of the
fire slammed him to the ground. Quickly, he took cover behind a dead
comrade.

"Everywhere you looked, men were firing from scattered positions, often
mistakenly at their own side," Petersen remembers. Slowly he began to
crawl forward. He came to an iron fence enclosing a small park and
climbed the fence. There, he found most of the other survivors of the
German platoons sheltering among trees and shrubs. The British had
drawn back to a group of houses on both sides of the park, and now in
the little square the Germans were caught in a crossfire. "I could
hear the screams of the wounded," Petersen says. "The British fired
flares pinpointing our positions and cut our group to pieces. Fifteen
men in my platoon were killed in less than five minutes."

Just at dawn the British stopped firing. The Germans also halted. In
the early light, Petersen saw that of the 250 men who had set out for
the bridge, more than half were either dead or wounded. "We never did
get near the approaches to the bridge. We just lay there and suffered,
without support from the vaunted SS or a single self-propelled gun.
That," Petersen says, was our

introduction to the Arnhem battle. For us, it was nothing less than a
massacre."

Hour by hour, men of the two missing battalions of the 1/ British
Airborne Division somehow reached the bridge. They had managed, by
twos and threes, to fight through Colonel Harzer's defense ring to the
north and west. Many were wounded, hungry and cold. They would add to
the medical and supply problems of Colonel Frost's group. But in these
hours, the stragglers were proud and in high spirits, despite their
exhaustion and wounds. They had arrived where briefing officers back
in England and their own commanders had told them to come. They
streamed in from every unit that had started out so confidently for the
Arnhem bridge the previous afternoon, and by dawn on the eighteenth
Frost estimated that he now had between 600 and 700 men on the northern
approach. But each hour that brought more troopers to the bridge
brought, too, the increasing sounds of mechanized equipment as General
Harmel's armored units entered the city and took up positions.

Even the German armor found Arnhem a hazardous and frightening place.
Along various routes throughout the city, ordinary Dutch civilians had
blocked the roads. Braving German and British bullets, men and women
living in the fighting areas had begun to collect the dead--British,
German, and their own countrymen. Sergeant Reginald Isherwood, of the
1/ Battalion, finally found his way to the center of Arnhem at
daybreak, after a hazardous night on the roads. There he saw "a sight
that will live with me until the end of my days." The Dutch, emerging
from basements, cellars, gardens and wrecked buildings, were collecting
bodies. "They carried the wounded to makeshift dressing stations and
shelters in the basements," Isherwood recalls, "but the bodies of the
dead were stacked like sandbags in long rows, the heads and feet placed
alternately." The proud, grieving citizens of Arnhem were laying the
bodies of friend and foe alike

across the streets in five-to-six-foot-high human roadblocks to prevent
German tanks from reaching Frost at the bridge.

For the civilians in the inner city, dawn brought no release from the
terror and confusion. Fires were out of control and spreading rapidly.
Huddled in cellars and basements, few people had slept. The night had
been punctuated by the crash of shells, the dull crump of mortars, the
whine of snipers' bullets and the staccato burst of machine guns.
Strangely, outside the older part of town, the citizens of Arnhem were
untouched by what was happening, and they were totally confused. They
telephoned friends in the inner city seeking information, only to learn
from the frightened householders that a pitched battle was taking place
on the northern end of the bridge, which the British were holding
against repeated German attacks. It was obvious to the callers that
German troops and vehicles were moving into the city from all
directions. Yet the faith of the Dutch did not falter. They believed
that liberation by the British and Americans was imminent. In these
outer parts of the city, people prepared for work as usual. Bakeries
opened, milkmen made their rounds, telephone operators, railroad
employees, utility workers--all were on their jobs. Civil servants
were planning to go to work, firemen still attempted to keep up with
the ever-growing number of burning buildings and, a few miles north of
Arnhem, Dr. Reinier van Hooff, director of Burgers Zoological Gardens,
tended his nervous, skittish animals. * Perhaps the only Dutch who
knew the extent of the battle were doctors and nurses who answered
calls constantly throughout the night. Ambulances raced through the
city, collecting casualties and rushing them to St. Elisabeth's
Hospital on the northwestern outskirts and to smaller nursing * In the
zoo were 12,000 carrier pigeons which the Germans had collected from
bird keepers throughout Arnhem. Fearing that the Dutch might use the
pigeons to carry reports, the birds had been confiscated and housed in
the zoo. German soldiers appeared daily to count the birds and even
dead pigeons were ordered kept until the Germans could check their
registration numbers.

homes within the city. No one in Arnhem realized as yet that the city
was already a no man's land and that the situation would grow steadily
worse. Arnhem, one of the most scenic spots in the Netherlands, would
soon become a miniature Stalingrad.

The Dutch in the inner city were, however, aware almost from the
beginning that liberation would not come easily. In the middle of the
night at the government police station on Eusebiusplein, less than a
quarter of a mile from the bridge, twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant
Joannes van Kuijk heard a quiet tapping at the station door. Opening
up, he saw British soldiers standing outside. Immediately Van Kuijk
asked them in. "They wanted the answers to all sorts of questions
bearing on the locations of buildings and landmarks," he remembers.
"Then a number of them left and began digging themselves in across the
road in the direction of the bridge--all of it done as silently as
possible." In front of a doctor's house nearby, Van Kuijk watched as
the British set up a mortar site and then positioned a 6-pounder
antitank gun in a corner of the doctor's garden. By dawn, Van Kuijk
saw that the British had formed a tight perimeter around the northern
extremity of the bridge. To him, these soldiers acted less like
liberators than like grim-faced defenders.

On the other side of Eusebius Buiten Singel, the winding,
grass-stripped boulevard close by the bridge, Coenraad Hulleman, a
labor mediator staying with his fianc@ee, Truid van der Sande, and her
parents in their villa, had been up all night listening to the firing
and explosions around the schoolhouse a street away, where Captain
Mackay's men were fighting off the Germans. Because of the intensity
of the battle, the Van der Sandes and Hulleman had taken refuge in a
small, windowless cellar beneath the central portion of the house.

Now, at dawn, Hulleman and his future father-in-law stole cautiously
upstairs to a second-floor room overlooking the boulevard. There, they
stared down in amazement. A dead German lay in the middle of a patch
of marigolds in the landscaped street, and all through the grass plots
they saw Germans in one-man slit trenches. Glancing along the
boulevard to his right, Hulleman

saw several German armored vehicles parked beside a high brick wall,
drawn up and waiting. Even as the two men watched, a new battle broke
out. Machine guns on the tanks suddenly fired into the towers of the
nearby Walburg Church, and Hulleman saw a fine red dust spew out. He
could only assume that paratroopers were in lookout positions in the
church. Almost immediately the tank fire was answered, and the Germans
in slit trenches began to machine-gun the houses on the opposite side
of the street. One of them was a costume shop and in its windows were
knights in armor. As Hulleman looked on, the bullets shattered the
show window and toppled the knights. Moved to tears, Hulleman turned
away. He hoped the sight was not prophetic.

A few blocks north, in a house near the concert hall, Willem Onck was
awakened shortly after dawn by the sound of troop movements in the
street. Someone hammered on his door and a German voice ordered Onck
and his family to stay inside and to draw the blinds. Onck did not
immediately obey. Running to the front window, he saw Germans with
machine guns at every corner of the street. In front of the Musis
Sacrum was an 88 mm. battery, and to Onck's utter amazement, German
soldiers were sitting next to it on the auditorium's chairs which they
had carried into the street. Watching them chatting casually with one
another, Onck thought they looked as if they were only waiting for the
concert to begin.

The most frustrated and angry civilians in the area were the members of
the Dutch underground. Several of them had contacted the British
almost immediately at the bridge, but their help had been politely
refused. Earlier, Arnhem's underground chief, Pieter Kruyff, had sent
Toon van Daalen and Gijsbert Numan to Oosterbeek to establish contact
with the British. They too had found that their assistance was not
needed. Numan remembers warning the troopers of snipers in the area
and advising them to avoid main roads. "One of them told me their
orders were to proceed to the bridge only, and they would follow their
indicated routes," Numan says. "I got the impression that they were in
dread of provocateurs and simply did not trust us."

Now, at dawn, Johannus Penseel held a meeting in his cellar with his
resistance workers. Penseel planned to take over a local radio station
and broadcast a proclamation that the city was free. A telephone call
from Numan changed his mind. "It goes badly," Numan reported. "The
situation is critical, and I think everything is already lost."
Penseel was stunned. "What do you mean?" he asked. Numan was now
near St. Elisabeth's Hospital. The British were finding it impossible
to get through the German lines and march to the bridge, he said.
Penseel immediately telephoned Pieter Kruyff, who advised the group to
hold back any planned activities--"a temporary nonintervention," as
Henri Knap, who attended the meeting, recalls. But the long-term hopes
of the resistance workers were crushed. "We were prepared to do
anything," Penseel recalls, "even sacrifice our lives if necessary.
Instead, we sat useless and unwanted. It was now increasingly clear
that the British neither trusted us nor intended to use us."

Ironically, in these early hours of Monday, September 18, when neither
SHAEF, Montgomery nor any Market-Garden commander had a clear picture
of the situation, members of the Dutch underground passed a report
through secret telephone lines to the 82nd Airborne's Dutch liaison
officer, Captain Arie Bestebreurtje, that the British were being
overwhelmed by panzer divisions at Arnhem. In the 82nd's message logs,
the notation appears: "Dutch report Germans winning over British at
Arnhem." In the absence of any direct communications from the Arnhem
battle area, this message was actually the first indication that the
Allied High Command received of the crisis that was overtaking the 1/
British Airborne Division.

At the ferry landing stage in the little village of Driel, seven miles
southwest of the Arnhem bridge, Pieter, the ferryman, prepared for his
first trip of the day across the Lower Rhine. The early-morning
commuters, who worked in the towns and villages on the northern side of
the river, huddled together in small groups, chilled by the morning
mist. Pieter took no part in the talk of his passengers about the
fighting going on west of Arnhem and in the city itself. His concern
was with the operation of the ferry and the daily schedules he must
maintain, as he had done for years.

A few cars, and farm carts filled with produce for stores and markets
to the north, were loaded first. Then men and women pushing bicycles
came aboard. At exactly 7 A.m. Pieter swung out into the river, the
ferry running smoothly along its cable. The trip took only a few
minutes. Edging up to the ramp below the village of Heveadorp on the
northern bank, passengers and vehicles disembarked. Above them, the
Westerbouwing, a hundred-foot-high hill, dominated the countryside. On
the northern bank, most commuters set off on roads leading east to
Oosterbeek, whose tenth-century church tower rose above groves of oaks
and lupine-covered moors. Beyond was Arnhem.

Other passengers waited to cross back to Driel. There, once again,
Pieter took on northbound travelers. One of them was young Cora
Baltussen. Only two weeks earlier, on September 5, which would always
be remembered by the Dutch as Mad Tuesday, she had watched the Germans'
frantic retreat. In Driel, the conquerors had not returned. For the
first time in months,

Cora had felt free. Now, once again, she was apprehensive. The joy of
the news of the paratroop landings the day before had been diminished
by rumors of the intense fighting in Arnhem. Still, Cora could not
believe the Germans would ever defeat the powerful Allied forces that
had come to liberate her country.

At the Heveadorp landing on the north side of the river, Cora pushed
her bicycle off the ferry and pedaled to Oosterbeek and the local
baker's shop. She had given her meager hoard of sugar rations to the
pastry shop for a special occasion. On this Monday, September 18, the
Baltussen preserves factory was observing its seventy-fifth year in
business and Cora's mother was celebrating her sixty-second birthday.
For the first time in months all of the family would be together. Cora
had come to Oosterbeek early to pick up the birthday cake, which would
mark both the company's anniversary and Mrs. Baltussen's birthday.

Friends had tried to dissuade Cora from making the trip. Cora refused
to listen. "What can possibly happen?" she had asked one friend.
"The British are in Oosterbeek and Arnhem. The war is almost over."

Her trip was uneventful. In these early hours Oosterbeek seemed
peaceful. There were British troops in the streets, the shops were
open, and a holiday mood prevailed. For the moment, although gunfire
could be heard only a few miles away, Oosterbeek was tranquil, not yet
touched by the battle. Although her order was ready, the baker was
amazed that she had come. "The war is all but over," she told him.
With her parcels, she cycled back to Heveadorp and waited until Pieter
brought the ferry in again. On the southern bank she returned to the
somnolent peace of little Driel, where, as usual, absolutely nothing
was happening.

On the British landing and drop zones, the officer with perhaps the
least glamorous job of all was going about it with his usual
capability. All through the night the men of Brigadier Philip "Pip"
Hicks's 1/ Airlanding Brigade had staved off a series of vicious enemy
attacks, as the motley groups under Von Tettau's command harassed the
brigade. Hicks's men were dug in around the perimeters to hold the
zones for the expected 10 A.m. drop of Brigadier Shan Hackett's 4th
Parachute Brigade, and the resupply missions that would follow. The
zones under Hicks's protection were also the supply dumps for the
British airborne.

Neither Hicks nor his men had managed more than an hour or two of
sleep. The Germans, attacking from the woods, had set the forest on
fire in some areas in the hope of burning out the British defenders.
The Red Devils promptly responded. Slipping behind the enemy, they
charged with fixed bayonets and forced the Germans into their own fire.
Signalman Graham Marples remembers the bitter nighttime battles
vividly. He and a few others came upon a platoon of dead British
troopers who had been overrun and completely wiped out. "No one said
anything," Marples remembers. "We just fixed bayonets and went right
on into the woods. We came out, but the Jerries didn't." Private
Robert Edwards, who had seen action in North Africa, Sicily and Italy,
recalls that "I had managed to come through all those actions more or
less unscathed, but in one day in Holland I had been in more fire
fights than all else put together."

The unending skirmishes had taken their toll. Several times

during the night Hicks had called upon Lieutenant Colonel W. F. K.
"Sheriff" Thompson for artillery support to force back the persistent
enemy attacks. His real fear was that German armor, which he now knew
was holding up the battalions going for the bridge, would break through
his meager defenses and drive him off the landing and drop zones. "I
went through some of the worst few hours I have ever spent in my life,"
Hicks recalls. "Two things were clear: although we did not know it at
the time we had landed virtually on top of two panzer divisions--which
weren't supposed to be there--and the Germans had reacted with
extraordinary speed." Under attack from Von Tettau's groups from the
west and Harzer's armor from the east, Hicks's lightly armed
paratroopers had no option but to hold until relieved, or until
reinforcements and supplies were safely down.

Colonel Charles Mackenzie, General Urquhart's chief of staff, had spent
the night on the Renkum Heath landing zone, about three miles away from
Hicks's command post. The intense fighting had caused Division to move
out of the woods and back onto the field. There the headquarters staff
took shelter in gliders for the rest of the night. Mackenzie was
concerned about the absence of any word from Urquhart. "For more than
nine hours, we had heard nothing whatsoever from the General," he
recalls. "I assumed that he was with Lathbury's 1/ Brigade, but
communications were out and we had heard nothing from either officer.
I knew that a decision would soon have to be made about the command of
the division. There always existed the possibility that Urquhart had
been captured or killed."

Early Monday, still without news, Mackenzie decided to confer with two
senior staff officers, Lieutenant Colonel R. G. Loder-Symonds and
Lieutenant Colonel P. H. Preston. Mackenzie informed them of
Urquhart's conversation with him prior to takeoff in England: the
succession of command, in case anything happened to Urquhart, should be
Lathbury, Hicks, then Hackett. Now, with Lathbury missing as well,
Mackenzie felt that Briga-

dier Hicks should be contacted. The other officers agreed.
Immediately they drove to Hicks's headquarters. There, in a house
close by the Heelsum-Arnhem road, Mackenzie told Hicks what he knew.
"We had a scanty report that Frost had taken the bridge, but that the
First and Third battalions were caught up in street fighting and had
not as yet been able to reinforce him," Mackenzie remembers.

The best course of action now, Mackenzie believed, was for Hicks to
release one of his Airlanding battalions and send it to the bridge. It
could be reinforced later by elements of Hackett's 4th Paratroop
Brigade when it arrived later in the morning. At the same time, Hicks
was asked to take command of the division immediately.

Hicks seemed stunned. His forces were already understrength and he did
not have a full battalion to send to the bridge. Yet it appeared the
British battle plan was faltering. If Frost failed to get help
immediately, the bridge might be lost; and if the landing areas were
overrun, Hackett's 4th Brigade could be destroyed before it was even
assembled.

Additionally, there seemed to be a tacit acknowledgment that Hicks was
being asked to assume command of a division already in the process of
disintegration through a total breakdown of communications and the
absence of the commanding officer. Reluctantly, Hicks released half of
one battalion--all he could spare--for defense of the bridge. *
Obviously, that decision was most urgent. The bridge had to be held.
Then, as Mackenzie remembers, "We finally convinced Hicks that he must
take command of the division." * He ordered half of the South
Staffords to start off for Arnhem. The other half of this battalion
would not arrive until the second lift, when, supplementing the advance
of Hackett's 11th Battalion, these units would also move out.

Few men had ever been asked to accept battleground responsibility for
an entire division under such a complexity of circumstances. Hicks
quickly discovered how critically the communications breakdown was
affecting all operations. The few messages from Frost at the bridge
were being received via Lieutenant

Colonel Sheriff Thompson, commanding the Airlanding Light Regiment
artillery. From an observation post in the steeple of the Oosterbeek
Laag church, two and one-half miles from the bridge, Thompson had
established a radio link with Major D. S. Munford's artillery command
post at Brigade headquarters in a waterworks building near the bridge.
The Thompson-Munford link afforded the only dependable radio
communications at Hicks's disposal.

Equally critical, Division had no communications with General
Browning's Corps headquarters near Nijmegen, or with the special
"Phantom Net" sets at Montgomery's headquarters. Of the few vital
messages that did reach England, most were sent over a BBC set, which
had been specially flown in for British war correspondents. Its signal
was weak and distorted. A high-powered German station and the British
set were operating on the same frequency. Ironically, Division could
pick up signals from rear Corps headquarters back in England, but were
unable to transmit messages back. What sparse communications did get
through via the BBC set were picked up at Browning's rear Corps
headquarters at Moor Park and then relayed to the Continent. The
transmission took hours and when the messages arrived they were
outdated and often virtually meaningless.

Frustrated and worried, Hicks had three immediate concerns: the weather
over England; the inability to confirm the planned arrival time of the
second lift; and his lack of a means of informing anyone of the true
situation in the Arnhem area. Additionally he could not warn Hackett
of the perilous hold the British had on the landing areas where the 4th
Brigade would expect to drop in cleared and protected zones.

Less crucial, but nonetheless troublesome, was the forthcoming
encounter with Brigadier Shan Hackett. The volatile Hackett, Mackenzie
told Hicks, would be informed of Urquhart's decision regarding the
chain of command the moment he landed. "I knew Hackett's temperament,"
Mackenzie recalls, "and I was not looking forward to the meeting. But
telling him was my job and I was following General Urquhart's orders.
I could no longer take the chance that something had not happened to
both the General and Lathbury."

At least Hicks was relieved of that delicate confrontation. The new
division commander had enough on his mind. "The situation was more
than just confusing," he remembers. "It was a bloody mess."

In the western suburbs of Arnhem, the once tidy parks and clean-swept
streets were scarred and pitted by the battle as the British 1/ and 3rd
battalions struggled to reach the bridge. Glass, debris and the broken
boughs of copper beech trees littered the cobblestone streets.
Rhododendron bushes and thick borders of bronze, orange and yellow
marigolds lay torn and crushed, and vegetable gardens in back of the
neat Dutch houses were in ruins. The snouts of British antitank guns
protruded from the shattered windows of shops and stores, while German
half-tracks, deliberately backed into houses and concealed by their
rubble, menaced the streets. Black smoke spewed up from burning
British and German vehicles and constant showers of debris rained down
as shells slammed into strong points. The crumpled bodies of the
wounded and dead lay everywhere. Many soldiers remember seeing Dutch
men and women, wearing white helmets and overalls emblazoned with red
crosses, dashing heedlessly through the fire from both sides, to drag
the injured and dying to shelter.

This strange, deadly battle now devastating the outskirts of the city
barely two miles from the Arnhem bridge seemed to have no plan or
strategy. Like all street fighting, it had become one massive, fierce,
man-to-man encounter in a checkerboard of streets.

The Red Devils were cold, unshaven, dirty and hungry. The fighting had
been too constant to allow men more than an occasional "brew-up" of
tea. Ammunition was running short and casualties were mounting; some
companies had lost as much as 50 percent of their strength. Sleep had
been impossible, except in brief snatches. Many men, weary and on the
move for hours, had lost all sense of time. Few knew exactly where
they were or how far away the bridge still was, but they were grimly
determined to get there. Years later, men like Private Henry Bennett
of Colonel Fitch's 3rd Battalion, on the middle, Tiger route, would
remember that throughout the constant skirmishes, sniping and mortar
fire, one command was constant: "Move! Move! Move!"

Yet to General Urquhart, now absent from Division headquarters for
nearly sixteen hours and without radio contact, the progress of the
attack was agonizingly slow. Since 3 A.m., when he had been roused at
the villa where he had spent a restless few hours, Urquhart, along with
Brigadier Lathbury, had been on the road continuously with the 3rd
Battalion. "Sharp encounters, brief bursts of fire, kept bringing the
entire column to a stop," Urquhart says. The psychological
effectiveness of German snipers disturbed the General. He had
anticipated that some of his men who had not been in action before
would be "a bit bullet-shy initially," but would rally quickly.
Instead, along some streets, sniper fire alone was slowing up the
progress of the entire battalion. Yet, rather than interfere with
Fitch's command, Urquhart remained silent. "As a divisional commander
mixed up in a battalion encounter ... I was in the worst possible
position to intervene, but all the time I was conscious of each
precious second that was being wasted." German snipers were dealt with
effectively, but Urquhart was appalled at the time it took to dig them
out.

So was Regimental Sergeant Major John C. Lord. Like the General, Lord
was chafing at the delay. "German resistance was fierce and
continuous, but at least a large part of our delay was caused by the
Dutch as well. They were out in the streets early, waving, smiling,
offering us ersatz coffee. Some of them had even

draped Union Jacks over their hedges. There they were, right in the
midst of the fighting, and they didn't even seem to realize it was
going on. They, with all their good intentions, were holding us up as
much as the Germans."

Suddenly the intensive sniper fire was replaced by something far more
serious: the piercing crack of the enemy's 88 mm. artillery and
self-propelled guns. At this point the forward units of Fitch's
battalion were close by the massive St. Elisabeth's Hospital, less
than two miles northwest of the Arnhem bridge. The hospital lay almost
at the confluence of the two main highways leading into Arnhem, along
which the 1/ and 3rd battalions were attempting to march to the bridge.
Here, elements of the Hohenstaufen Division's armor had been
positioned throughout the night. Both Colonel Dobie's 1/ Battalion on
the Ede-Arnhem road and Fitch's 3rd Battalion on the Utrecht road must
pass on either side of the junction to get to the bridge. Dobie's
battalion was the first to feel the force of Colonel Harzer's fanatical
SS units.

From a horseshoe-shaped perimeter covering the northern and western
approaches of the city, the Germans had forced Dobie's men off the
upper road and into cover in the surrounding built-up areas. SS men,
hidden on the rooftops, and snipers in attics had allowed forward units
to pass unhindered before opening up with a murderous fire on troops
coming up behind. In the confusion of the surprise attack, companies
and platoons were dispersed in all directions.

Now, employing the same tactics, the Germans were concentrating on
Fitch's 3rd Battalion. And, in a situation that could have disastrous
consequences, four critical officers-- the commanders of the 1/ and 3rd
battalions, the officer in charge of the 1/ Parachute Brigade and the
commander of the 1/ British Airborne Division--all found themselves
bottled up in the same small, heavily populated area. Ironically, as
in the case of Model and his commanders at Oosterbeek, General Urquhart
and Brigadier Lathbury were surrounded by an enemy oblivious to their
presence.

Trapped by fire from ahead and behind, the British columns scattered.
Some men headed for buildings along the Rhine, more took to the nearby
woods and others--among them, Urquhart and Lathbury-- ran for safety
into narrow streets of identical brick houses.

Urquhart and his group had just reached a three-story house in a block
of buildings near the main Utrecht-Arnhem road when the Germans shelled
the building. The British were uninjured, but German armor, Urquhart
was later to note, "moved through the streets with almost casual
immunity." As one tank rumbled down the street, its commander standing
in the open hatch looking for targets, Major Peter Waddy leaned out of
an upper-floor window of a house next to Urquhart's and expertly
dropped a plastic explosive into the open turret, blowing the tank to
pieces. * Other men, following Waddy's example, demolished two more
tanks. But, although the British fought fiercely, the lightly armed
troopers were no match for the German armor. * A short time later,
reconnoitering the British positions, Waddy was killed by a mortar
blast.

Urquhart's own predicament was increasing by the minute. He was
desperately anxious to get back to Division headquarters and gain
control of the battle. Caught up in the fighting, he believed his only
means of escape was to take to the streets and, in the confusion, try
to get through the German positions. His officers, fearful for his
safety, disagreed, but Urquhart was adamant. The intense fighting was,
as he saw it, still only "company-size action" and, as the buildings
the British occupied were not yet surrounded, he felt the group should
get out quickly before German strength increased and the ring
tightened.

During the hasty conference amid the noise of the battle, Urquhart and
his officers were dumfounded to see a British Bren gun carrier clatter
down the street, as though unaware of the German fire, and pull up
outside the building. A Canadian lieutenant, Leo Heaps, who in
Urquhart's words "seemed to have a charmed existence," leaped out of
the driver's seat and raced for the building. Behind Heaps was Charles
"Frenchie" Labouch@ere,

of the Dutch resistance, who was acting as Heaps's guide. The carrier
was loaded with supplies and ammunition which Heaps hoped to deliver to
Colonel Frost on the bridge. With German armor everywhere, the small
vehicle and its two occupants had miraculously survived enemy fire and
en route had, by chance, discovered Urquhart's whereabouts. Now, for
the first time in hours, Urquhart learned from Heaps what was
happening. "The news was far from encouraging," Urquhart later
recalled. "Communications were still out. Frost was on the northern
end of the bridge under heavy attack, but holding, and I was reported
missing or captured." After listening to Heaps, Urquhart told Lathbury
that it was now imperative "before we're completely bottled up to take
a chance and break out."

Turning to Heaps, Urquhart told the Canadian that if he reached
Division headquarters after completing his mission at the bridge, he
was to urge Mackenzie to "organize as much help as he could for Frost's
battalion." At all costs, including his own safety, Urquhart was
determined that Frost must get the supplies and men needed to hold
until Horrocks' tanks reached Arnhem.

As Heaps and Labouch@ere left, Urquhart and Lathbury set about making
their escape. The street outside was now being swept constantly by
enemy fire and buildings were crumpling under the pounding of shells.
Urquhart noted "a growing pile of dead around the houses we occupied,"
and concluded that any exit via the street would be impossible. The
commanders, along with others, decided to leave from the rear of the
building, where, under covering fire and smoke bombs, they might be
able to get away. Then, taking advantage of plantings in the back
gardens of the row houses, Urquhart and Lathbury hoped eventually to
reach a quiet area and make their way back to headquarters.

The route was nightmarish. While paratroopers laid down a heavy smoke
screen, Urquhart's group dashed out the back door, sprinted through a
vegetable garden and climbed a fence separating the house from its
neighbor. As they paused for a moment near the next enclosure,
Lathbury's Sten gun went off accidentally, barely missing the General's
right foot. As Urquhart was

later to write, "I chided Lathbury about soldiers who could not keep
their Stens under control. It was bad enough for a division commander
to be jinking about ... and it would have been too ironic for words to
be laid low by a bullet fired by one of my own brigadiers."

Climbing fence after fence, and once a ten-foot-high brick wall, the
men moved down the entire block of houses until, finally, they reached
an intersecting cobbled street. Then, confused and weary, they made a
drastic miscalculation. Instead of veering left, which might have
given them a margin of safety, they turned right toward St.
Elisabeth's Hospital, directly into the German fire.

Running ahead of Urquhart and Lathbury were two other officers, Captain
William Taylor of the Brigade's headquarters staff and Captain James
Cleminson of the 3rd Battalion. One of them called out suddenly but
neither Urquhart nor Lathbury understood his words. Before Taylor and
Cleminson could head them off, the two senior officers came upon a maze
of intersecting streets where, it seemed to Urquhart, "a German machine
gun was firing down each one." As the four men attempted to run past
one of these narrow crossings, Lathbury was hit.

Quickly the others dragged him off the street and into a house. There,
Urquhart saw that a bullet had entered the Brigadier's lower back and
he appeared to be temporarily paralyzed. "All of us knew," Urquhart
recalls, "that he could travel no farther." Lathbury urged the General
to leave immediately without him. "You'll only get cut off if you
stay, sir," he told Urquhart. As they talked, Urquhart saw a German
soldier appear at the window. He raised his automatic and fired at
point-blank range. The bloodied mass of the German's face disappeared.
Now, with the Germans so near, there was no longer any question that
Urquhart must leave quickly. Before going, he talked with the
middle-aged couple who owned the house and spoke some English. They
promised to get Lathbury to St. Elisabeth's Hospital as soon as there
was a lull in the fighting. In order to save the owners from German
reprisal, Urquhart and his party hid Lathbury in a cellar

beneath a stairway until he could be removed to the hospital. Then,
Urquhart remembers, "we left by the back door and into yet another maze
of tiny, fenced gardens." The three men did not get far, but
Urquhart's life may well have been saved by the prompt action of
fifty-five-year-old Antoon Derksen, owner of a terrace house at
Zwarteweg 14.

In the maelstrom of firing, Antoon, his wife Anna, their son Jan, and
daughter Hermina were sheltering in the kitchen at the rear of the
house. Glancing through a window, Derksen was amazed to see three
British officers vault over the fence into his back garden and head for
the kitchen door. Quickly, he let them in.

Unable to communicate--he didn't speak English and no one in Urquhart's
party knew Dutch--Antoon, gesturing, tried to warn the Britishers that
the area was surrounded. "There were Germans in the street," he later
recalled, "and at the back, in the direction the officers had been
going. At the end of the row of gardens there were Germans in position
at the corner."

Derksen hastily ushered his visitors up a narrow staircase to a landing
and from there into a bedroom. In the ceiling was a pull-down door
with steps leading to the attic. Cautiously looking out the bedroom
window the three men saw the reason for Derksen's wild pantomime. Only
a few feet below them, in positions all along the street, were German
troops. "We were so close to them," Urquhart remembers, "we could hear
them talking."

Urquhart was unable to guess whether the Germans had spotted his group
as they entered the rear of the house, or whether they might burst in
at any moment. In spite of Derksen's warning that the area was
surrounded, he pondered the twin risks of continuing through the chain
of back gardens or making a dash down the front street, using hand
grenades to clear the way. He was ready to take any chance to return
to his command. His officers, fearful for him, were not. At the
moment, the odds were simply too great. It was far better, they
argued, to wait until British troops overran the sector than for the
commanding general to risk capture or possible death.

The advice, Urquhart knew, was sound, and he did not want to

compel his officers to take risks that might prove suicidal. Yet, "my
long absence from Division headquarters was all I could think about,
and anything seemed better to me than to stay out of the battle in this
way."

The familiar creaking clack of caterpillar treads forced Urquhart to
stay put. From the window the three officers saw a German
self-propelled gun come slowly down the street. Directly outside the
Derksen house, it came to a halt. The top of the armored vehicle was
almost level with the bedroom window, and the crew, dismounting, now
sat talking and smoking directly below. Obviously, they were not
moving on and at any moment the Britishers expected them to enter the
house.

Quickly Captain Taylor pulled down the attic steps and the three
officers hurriedly climbed up. Crouched down and looking about him,
the six-foot Urquhart saw that the attic was little more than a crawl
space. He felt "idiotic, ridiculous, as ineffectual in the battle as a
spectator."

The house was now silent. Antoon Derksen, as a loyal Dutchman, had
sheltered the British. Now, fearing possible reprisal if Urquhart was
found, he prudently evacuated his family to a neighboring house. In
the nearly airless attic, and without food or water, Urquhart and his
officers could only wait anxiously, hoping either for the Germans to
pull back or for British troops to arrive. On this Monday, September
18, with Market-Garden only a day old, the Germans had almost brought
the Arnhem battle to a halt and, compounding all the errors and
miscalculations of the operation, Urquhart, the one man who might have
brought cohesion to the British attack, was isolated in an attic,
trapped within the German lines.

It had been a long, tedious mission for Captain Paul Gr@abner and his
9th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion. Allied paratroopers had not
landed in the eleven-mile stretch between Arnhem and Nijmegen. Of
that, Gr@abner was quite certain. But

enemy units were in Nijmegen. Immediately after a few of Gr@abner's
vehicles had crossed the great Waal river bridge, there had been a
short, brisk small-arms encounter. In the darkness, the enemy had
seemed to show no great inclination to continue the fight against his
armored vehicles, and Gr@abner had reported to headquarters that the
Allies seemed to have little strength in the city as yet.

Now, his scouting mission completed, Gr@abner ordered a few
self-propelled guns from his forty-vehicle unit to guard the southern
approaches to the Nijmegen bridge. With the rest of the patrol, he
headed back north to Arnhem. He had seen neither paratroopers nor any
enemy activity when crossing the Arnhem bridge the night before.
However, from radio messages, he had learned that some British troops
were on one side of the bridge. Harzer's headquarters had merely
called them "advance units." Gr@abner halted once more, this time at
the town of Elst, approximately midway between Arnhem and Nijmegen.
There again, to be within striking distance of either highway bridge,
he left off part of his column. With the remaining twenty-two
vehicles, he sped back toward the Arnhem bridge to clear it of whatever
small enemy units were there. Against paratroopers armed with only
rifles or machine guns, Gr@abner expected little difficulty. His
powerful armored units would simply smash through the lightly held
British defenses and knock them out.

At precisely 9:30 A.m., Corporal Don Lumb, from his rooftop position
near the bridge, yelled out excitedly, "Tanks! It's XXX Corps!" At
Battalion headquarters nearby, Colonel John Frost heard his own spotter
call out. Like Corporal Lumb, Frost felt a moment's heady
exhilaration. "I remember thinking that we would have the honor of
welcoming XXX Corps into Arnhem all by ourselves," he recalls. Other
men were equally cheered. On the opposite side of the northern
approach, the men under the ramp near Captain Eric Mackay's command
post could already hear the sound of heavy vehicles reverberating on
the bridge above.

Sergeant Charles Storey pounded up the stairs to Corporal Lumb's
lookout. Peering toward the smoke still rising from the southern
approach, Storey saw the column Lumb had spotted. His reaction was
immediate. Racing back downstairs, the pre-Dunkirk veteran shouted,
"They're Germans! Armored cars on the bridge!"

At top speed, the vanguard of Captain Paul Gr@abner's assault force
came on across the bridge. With extraordinary skill, German drivers,
swerving left and right, not only avoided the smoldering wreckage
cluttering the bridge, but drove straight through a mine field--a
string of platelike Teller mines that the British had laid during the
night. Only one of Gr@abner's five lead vehicles touched off a
mine--and only superficially damaged, kept on coming. On his side of
the ramp, Captain Mackay stared with amazement as the first of the
squat camouflaged cars, machine guns firing constantly, barreled off
the ramp, smashed through the British perimeter defenses, and kept on
going straight toward the center of Arnhem. Almost immediately, Mackay
saw another go past. "We had no antitank guns on our side," Mackay
says, "and I just watched helplessly as three more armored cars sped
right past us and took off up the avenue."

Gr@abner's daring plan to smash across the bridge by force and speed
was underway. Out of the sight of the British, on the southern
approach to the bridge, he had lined up his column. Now, half-tracks,
more armored cars, personnel carriers and even a few truckloads of
infantry, firing from behind heavy sacks of grain, began to advance.
Crouching behind the half-tracks were other German soldiers, firing
steadily.

The sudden surprise breakthrough of Gr@abner's lead vehicles had
stunned the British. They recovered quickly. Antitank guns from
Frost's side of the bridge began to get the range. From the entire
northern area a lethal fire enveloped the German column. From
parapets, rooftops, windows and slit trenches, troopers opened fire
with every weapon available, from machine guns to hand grenades.
Sapper Ronald Emery, on Mackay's side of the ramp, shot the driver and
codriver of the first half-track to cross.

As the second came into view, Emery shot its drivers, too. The
half-track came to a dead halt just off the ramp, whereupon the
remainder of its crew of six, abandoning the vehicle, were shot one by
one.

Relentlessly, Gr@abner's column pressed on. Two more half-tracks nosed
across the bridge. Suddenly, chaos overtook the German assault. The
driver of the third half-track was wounded. Panicked, he threw his
vehicle into reverse, colliding with the half-track behind. The two
vehicles, now inextricably tangled, slewed across the road, one
bursting into flames. Doggedly the Germans coming up behind tried to
force a passage. Accelerating their vehicles, frantic to gain the
northern side, they rammed into one another and into the growing piles
of debris tossed up by shells and mortar bursts. Out of control, some
half-tracks hit the edge of the ramp with such force that they toppled
over the edge and down into the streets below. Supporting German
infantrymen following the half-tracks were mercilessly cut down.
Unable to advance beyond the center of the bridge, the survivors raced
back to the southern side. A storm of fire ricocheted against the
girders of the bridge. Now, too, shells from Lieutenant Colonel
Sheriff Thompson's artillery, situated in Oosterbeek, and called in by
Major Dennis Munford from the attic of Brigade headquarters near
Frost's own building, screamed into Gr@abner's stricken vehicles.
Through all the din came the yelling of the now-exuberant British
paratroopers as they shouted the war cry, "Whoa Mohammed," which the
Red Devils had first used in the dry hills of North Africa in 1942. *
* In that campaign, paratroopers noted that the Arabs, shouting
messages to one another, seemed to begin each communication with these
two words. In Arnhem, the war cry was to take on special meaning. It
enabled paratroopers on both sides of the northern ramp to determine
who was friend or foe in the various buildings and positions, since the
Germans seemed unable to pronounce the words. According to Hilary St.
George Saunders in By Air to Battle, the war cry "seemed to rouse the
men to their highest endeavours."

The fierceness of the raging battle stunned the Dutch in the area.
Lambert Schaap, who lived with his family on the Rijnkade--the street
running east and west of the bridge--hurried his wife and nine children
off to a shelter. Schaap himself remained in his

house until a hail of bullets came through the windows, pitting walls
and smashing furniture. Under this intense barrage Schaap fled. To
Police Sergeant Joannes van Kuijk, the battle seemed endless. "The
firing was furious," he recalls, "and one building after another seemed
to be hit or burning. Telephone calls from colleagues and friends were
constant, asking for information about what was happening. We were
having a hard time of it in our building, and neighboring premises were
catching fire. The houses on Eusebius Buiten Singel were also
alight."

On that wide boulevard near the northern approach, Coenraad Hulleman,
in his fianc@ee's house only a few doors away from Captain Mackay's
command post, now stayed with the rest of the Van der Sande family in
their basement shelter. "There was a funny sound overriding all the
other noise and someone said it was raining," Hulleman remembers. "I
went up to the first floor, looked out, and saw that it was fire.
Soldiers were running in every direction, and the entire block seemed
to be in flames. The battle moved right up the boulevard, and suddenly
it was our turn. Bullets smacked into the house, smashing windows, and
upstairs we heard musical notes as the piano was hit. Then, amazingly,
a sound like someone typing in Mr. Van der Sande's office. The
bullets were simply chewing up the typewriter." Hulleman's fianc@ee,
Truid, who had followed him up, saw that shots were hitting the tower
of the massive Church of St. Eusibius. As she watched in amazement
the gold hands of the huge clock on the church spun crazily as though,
Truid remembers, "time was racing by."

To the bridge fighters, time had lost all meaning. The shock, speed
and ferocity of the battle caused many men to think that the fight had
gone on for many hours. Actually, Gr@abner's attack had lasted less
than two. Of the armored vehicles that Colonel Harzer had jealously
guarded from General Harmel, twelve lay wrecked or burning on the
northern side. The remainder disengaged from the carnage and moved
back to Elst, minus their commander. In the bitter no-quarter
fighting, Captain Paul Gr@abner had been killed.

Now the British, in pride and triumph, began to assess the damage.
Medics and stretcher-bearers, braving the unrelenting sniper fire,
moved through the smoke and litter, carrying the wounded of both sides
to shelter. The Red Devils on the bridge had repulsed and survived the
horror of an armored attack and, almost as though they were being
congratulated on their success, 2nd Battalion signalmen suddenly picked
up a strong clear message from XXX Corps. The grimy, weary troopers
imagined that their ordeal was all but over. Now, beyond any doubt,
Horrocks' tanks must be a scant few hours away.

From airfields behind the German border, swarms of fighters took to the
air. To amass and fuel the planes, the nearly depleted Luftwaffe had
mounted an all-out effort. Now, after a frantic, sleepless night,
during which fighters had been rushed in from all over Germany, some
190 planes gathered over Holland between 9 and 10 A.m. Their mission
was to destroy the second lift of Market. Unlike the skeptical Field
Marshal Model, the Luftwaffe generals believed the captured
Market-Garden plans to be authentic. They saw a glittering opportunity
to achieve a major success. From the plans, German air commanders knew
the routes, landing zones and drop times of the Monday lift. Squadrons
of German fighters patrolling the Dutch coast across the known Allied
flight paths and drop zones waited to pounce on the airborne columns,
due to begin their drops at 10 A.m. Zero hour passed with no sign of
the Allied air fleet. The short-range fighters were ordered to land,
refuel and take off again. But the sky remained empty. None of the
anticipated targets materialized. Baffled and dismayed, the Luftwaffe
high command could only wonder what had happened.

What had happened was simple. Unlike Holland, where the weather was
clear, Britain was covered by fog. On the bases, British and American
airborne troops, ready to go, waited impatiently by their planes and
gliders. On this crucial morning, when

every hour mattered, General Lewis H. Brereton, the First Allied
Airborne Army commander, was, like the men of the second lift, at the
mercy of the weather. After consultation with the meteorologists,
Brereton was forced to reschedule zero hour. The men in and around
Arnhem and the Americans down the corridor-- all holding against the
increasing German buildup --must now wait four long hours more. The
second lift could not reach the drop zones before 2 P.m.

At Valkenswaard, fifty-seven miles south of Arnhem, ground fog had held
up the planned 6:30 A.m. jump-off time for the tanks of XXX Corps.
Scout cars, however, had set out on schedule. Patrolling ahead and to
the east and west since daybreak, they were feeling out the German
strength. To the east, heather-covered sand and small streams made the
area barely negotiable even for reconnaissance vehicles. West of the
village, wooden bridges over streams and rivers were considered too
light to support tanks. As scout cars in the center moved along the
narrow, one-tank-wide main road out of Valkenswaard, they suddenly
encountered a German tank and two self-propelled guns, which drove off
toward Eindhoven as the patrol approached. From all reports it seemed
clear that the quickest route into Eindhoven was still the highway,
despite the sighting of German armor and the expectation of running
into more as the British approached the city. Now, three hours later,
General Horrocks' tanks were only just beginning to roll again. As
Colonel Frost's men engaged Captain Gr@abner's units at the Arnhem
bridge, the spearheading Irish Guards were

finally on the move, heading up the main road toward Eindhoven. Stiff
German resistance had thwarted Horrocks' plan to smash out from the
Meuse-Escaut Canal on Sunday and link up with General Taylor's 101/
Airborne Division in Eindhoven in less than three hours. By nightfall
on the seventeenth, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur's tankers had come
only seven miles to Valkenswaard, six miles short of the day's
objective. There had seemed little reason to push on during the night.
Brigadier Norman Gwatkin, chief of staff of the Guards Armored
Division, had told Vandeleur that the Son bridge beyond Eindhoven was
destroyed. Bridging equipment would have to be brought up before
Vandeleur's tanks could cross. As Vandeleur remembers, Gwatkin said,
"Push on to Eindhoven tomorrow, old boy, but take your time. We've
lost a bridge."

Unaware of the setback, men were impatient at the delay. Lieutenant
John Gorman, who had attended General Horrocks' briefing in
Leopoldsburg prior to the break-out, had thought at the time that there
were too many bridges to cross. Now Gorman, recipient of the Military
Cross a few weeks earlier, was edgy and irritable. His original fears
seemed justified. Anxious to be off, Gorman could not understand why
the Guards Armored had spent the night in Valkenswaard. Habit, he
noted, "seemed to dictate that one slept at night and worked by day,"
but now, Gorman felt, such behavior should not apply. "We must get
on," he remembers saying. "We can't wait." Lieutenant Rupert Mahaffey
was equally disturbed at the Guards' slow advance. "I began having the
first faint traces of conscience," he says. "Our advance seemed slower
than intended, and I knew that if we did not pick up the pace soon we
weren't going to get to Arnhem on time."

Although the scouting patrols of the Household Cavalry had warned of
waiting German armor and infantry, the tanks of the Irish Guards met
little opposition until they reached the village of Aalst, halfway to
Eindhoven. Then, from the pinewood forests flanking the highway, a
hail of infantry fire engulfed the column, and a lone self-propelled
gun engaged the leading tanks. It was

quickly put out of action and Vandeleur's force rumbled on through the
village. Two miles north, at a small bridge over the river Dommel, the
Irish were held up again, this time by heavy artillery fire. Four 88
mm. guns covered the bridge. Infantry with heavy machine guns were
hidden in nearby houses and behind concrete walls. Immediately the
lead vehicles halted and British troops, jumping from the tanks, fought
back.

To move on as quickly as possible, Vandeleur decided to call in the
rocket-firing Typhoons that had aided the column so expertly during the
previous day's advance. Flight Lieutenant Donald Love, now in complete
charge of ground-to-air communication, put through the request. To his
astonishment, he was turned down. In Belgium, the squadrons were
weathered in by fog. Vandeleur, Love recalls, "was livid." Squinting
into the bright weather over Holland, he asked Love sarcastically "if
the R.a.f. is frightened by sunshine."

By now the entire column, stretching back almost to the Belgian border,
was stalled by the well-sited enemy guns. Lead tanks tried to edge
forward, and one gun, firing directly down the road, stopped them at
point-blank range. As his tanks opened up against the Germans,
Vandeleur called for heavy artillery and quickly ordered patrols to
move out west along the river in search of a bridge or ford where his
vehicles might cross, outflank the German battery and attack from the
rear.

A barrage of steel whistled over the lead tanks as British batteries
began to engage the enemy. Well positioned and fiercely determined,
the Germans continued to fire. For two hours the battle went on.
Fuming at the delay, Vandeleur was helpless. All he could do was
wait.

But, barely four miles to the north, one of the reconnaissance units
had met with unexpected success. After a circuitous cross-country trip
through water-veined terrain and marshes, and across fragile wooden
bridges, one troop of scout cars, skirting the German positions, came
suddenly upon American paratroopers north of Eindhoven. Shortly before
noon, Lieutenant John Palmer, commanding the Household Cavalry scout
unit, was

warmly greeted by Brigadier General Gerald Higgins, deputy commander of
the 101/ Screaming Eagles. By radio, Palmer jubilantly informed his
headquarters that the "Stable Boys have contacted our Feathered
Friends." The first of three vital link-ups along the corridor had
been made, eighteen hours behind Market-Garden's schedule.

With contact finally established, discussion immediately turned to the
Son bridge. Waiting British engineering units needed complete details
in order to bring forward the materials and equipment needed to repair
the damaged crossing. Sappers, moving up alongside Vandeleur's lead
columns, prepared to rush to the bridge the moment the advance picked
up again. Information could have been passed by radio, but the
Americans had already discovered a simpler method. The surprised
British were radioed to ask their engineers to telephone "Son 244."
The call went immediately through the German-controlled automatic
telephone exchange, and within minutes the Americans at the Son bridge
had given British engineers the vital information they needed to bring
up the proper bridging equipment.

In the village of Aalst, Vandeleur's tankers were startled by a sudden
abrupt end to the German fire which had kept them immobilized so long
on the main road. One of their own squadrons had opened the way.
Working slowly down the western bank of the Dommel river, a British
reconnaissance force came upon a crossing a mile north of Aalst and
behind the German positions. The squadron charged the German guns from
the rear, overran their positions and ended the battle.

Unaware of the move, the stalled tankers at Aalst thought the sudden
silence was a lull in the fighting. Major Edward Tyler, in charge of
the lead Number 2 Squadron, was debating whether he should take
advantage of the cessation and order his tanks to smash on, when he
spotted a man cycling down the main road toward the column. Stopping
on the far bank, the man jumped off the bicycle and, waving
frantically, ran across the bridge. The astounded Tyler heard him say:
"Your General! Your General! The Boche have gone!"

Breathlessly, the Dutchman introduced himself. Cornelis Los,
forty-one, was an engineer employed in Eindhoven but living in Aalst.
"The road," Los told Tyler, "is open and you have put out of action the
only German tank at the village entrance." Then, Tyler recalls, "he
produced a detailed sketch of all the German positions between Aalst
and Eindhoven."

Immediately, Tyler gave the order to advance. The tanks moved over the
bridge and up the road, passing the now ruined and deserted German
artillery positions. Within the hour, Tyler saw the sprawl of
Eindhoven up ahead and what appeared to be thousands of Dutch thronging
the road, cheering and waving flags. "The only obstruction holding us
up now are the Dutch crowds," Major E. Fisher-Rowe radioed back down
the column. In the heady carnival atmosphere, the cumbersome tanks of
XXX Corps would take more than four hours to move through the city.
Not until shortly after 7 P.m. did advance units reach the Son bridge,
where Colonel Robert F. Sink's weary engineers were working, as they
had been ever since it was destroyed, to repair the vital span.

From the outset, the synchronized Market-Garden schedule had allowed
little margin for error. Now, like the thwarted advance of the British
battalions into Arnhem, the damage to the bridge at Son was a major
setback that threatened the entire operation. Twenty-eight miles of
the corridor--from the Belgian border north to Veghel--were now
controlled by the Anglo-Americans. With extraordinary speed, the 101/
Division had covered its fifteen-mile stretch of highway, capturing the
principal towns of Eindhoven, St. Oedenrode and Veghel, and all but
two of eleven crossings. Yet Horrocks' 20,000-vehicle relief column
could advance no farther until the Son crossing was repaired. British
engineers and equipment, moving up with the lead tanks, must work
against time to repair the bridge and move XXX Corps over the
Wilhelmina Canal, for there was no longer an alternative route that
Horrocks' tanks could take.

In the planning stages General Maxwell Taylor, knowing that the Son
bridge was vital to a straight dash up the corridor, had included a
secondary target as well. To counteract just such a setback as had
occurred at Son, Taylor had ordered a one-hundred-foot-long concrete
road bridge over the canal at the village of Best to be taken as well.
Four miles west of the main road, the bridge could still be used in an
emergency. Since intelligence sources believed that the area held few
German troops, a lone company had been assigned to grab the bridge and
a nearby railway crossing.

Best was to become a tragic misnomer for the American troopers sent to
secure it. Lieutenant Edward L. Wierzbowski's reinforced company had
been greatly reduced during ferocious night fighting on the
seventeenth. Infiltrating along dikes and canal banks, and through
marshes, the dogged troopers under Wierzbowski's command pressed on
against overwhelming German forces; once they were within fifteen feet
of the bridge before being stopped by a barrage of fire. At various
times during the night, word filtered back that the bridge had been
taken. Other reports claimed that Wierzbowski's company had been wiped
out. Reinforcements, like the original company, became quickly
engulfed in the desperate, unequal struggle. At 101/ headquarters, it
was soon clear that German forces were heavily concentrated at Best.
Far from being lightly held, the village contained upwards of one
thousand troops--units of the forgotten German Fifteenth Army. And
like a sponge, Best was drawing more and more American forces. As
fighting raged throughout the area, Wierzbowski and the few survivors
of his company were almost in the dead center of the battle. So
surrounded that their own reinforcements did not know they were there,
they continued to fight for the bridge.

Around noon, as advance parties of British and Americans linked up in
Eindhoven, the bridge at Best was blown by the Germans. So close were
Wierzbowski and his men that falling debris added to the wounds they
had already sustained. Elsewhere in the area, casualties were also
heavy. One of the most

colorful and acerbic of the 101/ commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Robert
Cole, who held the Congressional Medal of Honor, was killed. The medal
also would be awarded posthumously to another soldier. Private Joe E.
Mann, so badly wounded at the bridge that both arms were bandaged and
tied to his sides, saw a German grenade land among the men he was with.
Unable to free his arms, Mann fell on the grenade, saving the others
around him. As Wierzbowski reached him, Mann spoke just once. "My
back is gone," he told the lieutenant. Then he was dead.

With the Best bridge gone, the success of Market-Garden now hinged more
critically than ever on the speed with which engineers could repair the
Son crossing. In the interlocking phases of the plan-- each link
dependent on the next--the road beyond Son was empty of the tanks that
should have moved along it hours before. Montgomery's daring attack
was moving into ever-deepening trouble.

The farther up the corridor, the more compounded the problems became.
Isolated in the center from General Taylor's Screaming Eagles to the
south and the Red Devils in Arnhem, General Gavin's 82nd Airborne were
holding firmly to the 1,500-foot-long bridge at Grave and the smaller
one near Heumen. To the southwest, after a brisk fight, platoons of
the 504th and 508th, attacking simultaneously from opposite sides of
the Maas-Waal Canal, seized another bridge over the Grave-Nijmegen
highway at the village of Honinghutie, opening an alternate route into
Nijmegen for Horrocks' tanks. But just as the damaged Son bridge was
holding up the British advance into the middle sector of the corridor,
so the inability of the 82nd to seize the Nijmegen crossing quickly had
created its own problems. There, SS troops were now dug in at the
southern approaches. Well protected and concealed, they repeatedly
repulsed attacks by a company of the 508th. As each hour passed,
German strength was building, and Gavin could not spare more men in an
all-out effort to get the

bridge; for throughout the 82nd's vast lodgment-- an area ranging ten
miles north to south and twelve miles east to west--a series of wild,
apparently uncoordinated enemy attacks threatened disaster.

Patrols along the Grave-Nijmegen highway were being constantly attacked
by infiltrating enemy troops. Corporal Earl Oldfather, on the lookout
for snipers, saw three men in a field the 504th was occupying. "One
was bailing water out of his hole, the other two were digging,"
Oldfather recalls. "I waved and saw one of them pick up his rifle.
They were Jerries who had gotten right into our field and were firing
at us from our own foxholes."

Farther east, the two vital landing zones between the Groesbeek Heights
and the German frontier quickly became battlefields as waves of
low-caliber German infantry were thrown against the troopers. Among
them were naval and Luftwaffe personnel, communications troops,
soldiers on furlough, hospital orderlies, and even recently discharged
convalescents. Corporal Frank Ruppe remembers that the first Germans
he saw wore a bewildering variety of uniforms and rank insignia. The
attack began so suddenly, he recalls, that "we were ambushed
practically next to our own outposts." Units appeared as though from
nowhere. In the first few minutes Lieutenant Harold Gensemer captured
an overconfident German colonel who boasted that "my men will soon kick
you right off this hill." They almost did.

Swarming across the German border from the town of Wyler and out of the
Reichswald in overwhelming numbers, the Germans burst through the
82nd's perimeter defenses and quickly overran the zones, capturing
supply and ammunition dumps. For a time the fighting was chaotic. The
82nd defenders held their positions as long as they could, then slowly
pulled back. All over the area troops were alerted to rush to the
scene. Men on the edge of Nijmegen force-marched all the way to the
drop zones to give additional support.

A kind of panic seemed to set in among the Dutch also. Private Pat
O'Hagan observed that as his platoon withdrew from the

Nijmegen outskirts, the Dutch flags he had seen in profusion on the
march into the city were being hurriedly taken down. Private Arthur
"Dutch" Schultz, * a Normandy veteran and a Browning automatic gunner
for his platoon, noticed that "everyone was nervous, and all I could
hear was the chant "BAR front and center."" Everywhere he looked he saw
Germans. "They were all around us and determined to rush us off our
zones." It was clear to everyone that until German armor and seasoned
reinforcements arrived, the enemy units, estimated at being close to
two battalions, had been sent on a suicide mission: to wipe out the
82nd at any cost and hold the drop zones--the division's lifeline for
reinforcements and supplies. If the Germans succeeded they might
annihilate the second lift even as it landed. * See Cornelius Ryan,
The Longest Day, pp. 63, 300.

At this time, General Gavin believed that the scheduled lift had
already left England. There was no way of stopping or diverting them
in time. Thus, Gavin had barely two hours to clear the areas and he
needed every available trooper. Besides those already engaged, the
only readily available reserves were two companies of engineers.
Immediately Gavin threw them into the battle.

Bolstered by mortar and artillery fire, the troopers, outnumbered
sometimes five to one, fought all through the morning to clear the
zones. * Then with fixed bayonets many men went after the Germans down
the slopes. It was only at the height of the battle that Gavin learned
that the second lift would not arrive until 2 P.m. The woods remained
infested with a hodgepodge of German infantry and it was obvious that
these enemy forays heralded more concentrated and determined attacks.
By juggling his troops from one area to another, Gavin was confident of
holding, but he was only too well aware that for the moment the 82nd's
situation was precarious. And now with information that the Son bridge
was out and being repaired, he could not expect a * In the wild,
chaotic fighting that ensued over a period of four hours on the zones,
one of the most beloved officers in the 82nd, the heavyweight champion
of the division, Captain Anthony Stefanich, was killed. "We've come a
long way together," he told his men. "Tell the boys to do a good job."
Then he died.

British link-up before D plus 2. Impatiently and with growing concern,
Gavin waited for the second lift, which would bring him desperately
needed artillery, ammunition and men.

From the smoking ruins of Arnhem to the damaged crossing at Son, in
foxholes, forests, alongside dikes, in the rubble of demolished
buildings, on tanks and near the approaches of vital bridges, the men
of Market-Garden and the Germans they fought heard the low rumble come
out of the west. In column after column, darkening the sky, the planes
and gliders of the second lift were approaching. The steady, mounting
drone of motors caused a buoyant renewal of vigor and hope in the
Anglo-Americans and the Dutch people. For most Germans, the sound was
like a forerunner of doom. Combatants and civilians alike stared
skyward, waiting. The time was a little before 2 P.m. Monday,
September 18th.

The armada was gigantic, dwarfing even the spectacle of the day before.
On the seventeenth, flights had followed two distinct northern and
southern paths. Now, bad weather and the hope of effecting greater
protection from the Luftwaffe had caused the entire second lift to be
routed along the northern path to Holland. Condensed into one immense
column covering mile after mile of sky, almost four thousand aircraft
were layered at altitudes from 1,000 to 2,500 feet.

Flying wing tip to wing tip, 1,336 American C-47,'s and 340 British
Stirling bombers made up the bulk of the sky train. Some of the planes
carried troops. Others towed a staggering number of gliders--1,205
Horsas, Wacos and mammoth Hamilcars. Posi-

ned at the rear of the 100-mile-long convoy, 252 four-engined Liberator
bombers were ferrying cargo. Protecting the formations above and on
the flanks, 867 fighters--ranging from squadrons of British Spitfires
and rocket-firing Typhoons to American Thunderbolts and
Lightnings--flew escort. In all, at time of takeoff, the second lift
carried 6,674 airborne troops, 681 vehicles plus loaded trailers, 60
artillery pieces with ammunition and nearly 600 tons of supplies,
including two bulldozers. * * In the compilation of plane figures
there are some discrepancies. American sources give a total of 3,807
aircraft; British figures list 4,000. The count used above comes from
General Browning's after-action Corps report, indicating that the
difference in figures seems to lie in the number of fighter planes.
According to U.s. sources, 674 England-based fighters flew escort for
the second lift, but not included in that number were 193 Belgium-based
planes, which brings the over-all total of fighters to 867. By far the
best account of the air action in Market-Garden, particularly as it
pertains to the troop carriers, is the official U.s.a.f. Historical
Division's Study No. 97, by Dr. John C. Warren, entitled Airborne
Operations in World War II, European Theater."

Wreathed by flak bursts, the huge armada made landfall over the Dutch
coast at Schouwen Island, then headed inland due east to a
traffic-control point south of the town of s'Hertogenbosch. There,
with fighters leading the way, the column split into three sections.
With timed precision, executing difficult and dangerous maneuvers, the
American contingents swung south and east for the zones of the 101/ and
82nd as British formations headed due north for Arnhem.

As on the previous day, there were problems, although they were
somewhat diminished. Confusion, abortions and fatal mishaps struck the
glider fleets in particular. Long before the second lift reached the
drop zones, 54 gliders were downed by structural or human error. Some
26 machines aborted over England and the Channel; two were seen to
disintegrate during flight, and 26 more were prematurely released on
the 80-mile flight over enemy territory, landing far from their zones
in Belgium and Holland and behind the German frontier. In one bizarre
incident a distraught trooper rushed to the cockpit and yanked the
release lever separating the glider from its tow plane. But troop
casualties over-all were low. The greatest loss, as on the previous
day, was in precious cargo. Once again Urquhart's men seemed

plagued by fate--more than half of the lost cargo gliders were bound
for Arnhem.

Fate had ruled the Luftwaffe too. At 10 A.m., with no sign of the
expected Allied fleet, German air commanders pulled back more than half
the 190-plane force to their bases, while the remainder patrolled the
skies over northern and southern Holland. Half of these squadrons were
caught in the wrong sector or were being refueled as the second lift
came in. As a result, fewer than a hundred Messerschmitts and FW-190'S
rushed to battle in the Arnhem and Eindhoven areas. Not a single enemy
plane was able to penetrate the massive Allied fighter screen
protecting the troop carrier columns. After the mission Allied pilots
claimed 29 Messerschmitts destroyed against a loss of only five
American fighters.

Intense ground fire began to envelop the air fleet as it neared the
landing zones. Approaching the 101/'s drop areas north of Son,
slow-moving glider trains encountered low ground haze and rain,
cloaking them to some extent from German gunners. But sustained and
deadly flak fire from the Best region ripped into the oncoming columns.
One glider, probably carrying ammunition, caught a full antiaircraft
burst, exploded, and completely disappeared. Releasing their gliders,
four tow planes were hit, one after the other. Two immediately caught
fire; one crashed, the other made a safe landing. Three gliders
riddled with bullets crash-landed on the zones with their occupants
miraculously untouched. In all, of the 450 gliders destined for
General Taylor's 101/, 428 reached the zones with 2,656 troopers, their
vehicles and trailers.

Fifteen miles to the north, General Gavin's second lift was threatened
by the battles still raging on the drop zones as the gliders began to
come in. Losses to the 82nd were higher than in the 101/ area. Planes
and gliders ran into a hail of antiaircraft fire. Although less
accurate than on the day before, German gunners managed to shoot down
six tow planes as they turned steeply away after releasing their
gliders. The wing of one was blasted off, three others crashed in
flames, another came down in

Germany. The desperate fire fight for possession of the zones forced
many gliders to land elsewhere. Some came down three to five miles
from their targets; others ended up in Germany; still more decided to
put down fast on their assigned landing zones. Pitted by shells and
mortar, crisscrossed by machine-gun fire, each zone was a no man's
land. Coming in quickly to hard landings, many gliders smashed
undercarriages or nosed over completely. Yet the pilots' drastic
maneuvers worked. Troops and cargo alike sustained surprisingly few
casualties. Not a man was reported hurt in landing accidents, and only
forty-five men were killed or wounded by enemy fire in flight or on the
zones. Of 454 gliders, 385 arrived in the 82nd's area, bringing 1,782
artillerymen, 177 jeeps and 60 guns. Initially, more than a hundred
paratroopers were thought to have been lost, but later more than half
the number made their way to the 82nd's lines after distant landings.
The grimly determined glider pilots sustained the heaviest casualties;
fifty-four were killed or listed as missing.

Although the Germans failed to seriously impede the arrival of the
second lift, they scored heavily against the bomber resupply missions
arriving after the troop-carrier and glider trains. By the time the
first of the 252 huge four-engined B-24 Liberators approached the 101/
and 82nd zones, antiaircraft gunners had found the range. Swooping
down ahead of the supply planes, fighters attempted to neutralize the
flak guns. But, just as German batteries had done when Horrocks' tanks
began their break-out on the seventeenth, so now the enemy forces held
their fire until the fighters passed over. Then, suddenly they opened
up. Within minutes, some 21 escort planes were shot down.

Following the fighters, bomber formations came in at altitudes varying
from 800 to 50 feet. Fire and haze over the zones hid the identifying
smoke and ground markers, so that even experienced dropmasters aboard
the planes could not locate the proper fields. From the bays of the
B-24's, each carrying approximately two tons of cargo, supplies began
to fall haphazardly, scattering over a wide area. Racing back and
forth throughout their drop zones, 82nd troopers managed to recover 80
percent of their supplies,

almost in the faces of the Germans. The 101/ was not so fortunate.
Many of their equipment bundles landed almost directly among the
Germans in the Best area. Less than 50 percent of their resupply was
recovered. For General Taylor's men in the lower part of the corridor,
the loss was serious, since more than a hundred tons of cargo intended
for them consisted of gasoline, ammunition and food. So devastating
was the German assault that about 130 bombers were damaged by ground
fire, seven were shot down, and four others crash-landed. The day that
had begun with so much hope for the beleaguered Americans along the
corridor was rapidly becoming a grim fight for survival.

Lieutenant Pat Glover of Brigadier Shan Hackett's 4th Parachute Brigade
was out of the plane and falling toward the drop zone south of the
Ede-Arnhem road. He felt the jerk as his chute opened, and
instinctively reached across and patted the zippered canvas bag
attached to the harness over his left shoulder. Inside the bag, Myrtle
the parachick squawked and Glover was reassured. Just as he had
planned it back in England, Myrtle was making her first combat jump.

As Glover looked down it seemed to him that the entire heath below was
on fire. He could see shells and mortars bursting all over the landing
zone. Smoke and flames billowed up, and some paratroopers, unable to
correct their descent, were landing in the inferno. Off in the
distance where gliders were bringing in the remainder of Brigadier Pip
Hicks's Airlanding Brigade, Glover could see wreckage and men running
in all directions. Something had gone terribly wrong. According to
the briefings, Glover knew that Arnhem was supposed to be lightly held
and the drop zones, by now, should certainly be cleared and quiet.
There had been no indication before the second lift left from England
that anything was wrong. Yet it seemed to Glover that a full-scale
battle was going on right beneath him. He wondered if by some mistake
they were jumping in the wrong place.

As he neared the ground the stutter of machine guns and the dull thud
of mortar bursts seemed to engulf him. He hit ground, careful to roll
onto his right shoulder to protect Myrtle, and quickly shucked off his
harness. Nearby, Glover's batman, Private Joe Scott, had just set
down. Glover handed him Myrtle's bag. "Take good care of her," he
told Scott. Through the haze covering the field, Glover spotted yellow
smoke which marked the rendezvous point. "Let's go," he yelled to
Scott. Weaving and crouching, the two men started out. Everywhere
Glover looked there was utter confusion. His heart sank. It was
obvious that the situation was going badly.

As Major J. L. Waddy came down, he too heard the ominous sound of
machine-gun fire that seemed to be flaying the area on all sides. "I
couldn't understand it," he recalls. "We had been given the impression
that the Germans were in flight, that there was disorder in their
ranks." Swinging down in his parachute, Waddy found that the drop zone
was almost obscured by smoke from raging fires. At the southern end of
the field where he landed, Waddy set out for the battalion's rendezvous
area. "Mortars were bursting everywhere, and I saw countless
casualties as I went along." When he neared the assembly point, Waddy
was confronted by an irate captain from Battalion headquarters who had
jumped into Holland the previous day. "You're bloody late," Waddy
recalls the man shouting. "Do you realize we've been waiting here for
four hours?" Agitatedly, the officer immediately began to brief Waddy.
"I was shocked as I listened," Waddy remembers. "It was the first
news we had that things weren't going as well as had been planned. We
immediately got organized, and as I looked around, it seemed to me that
the whole sky up ahead was a mass of flames."

On both landing zones west of the Wolfheze railway station--at Ginkel
Heath and Reyers-Camp--paratroopers and glider-borne infantrymen were
dropping into what appeared to be a raging battle. From the captured
Market-Garden documents the Germans had known the location of the
landing areas. And through enemy radar installations in the
still-occupied Channel

ports such as Dunkirk, they, unlike the British on the ground, could
calculate with accuracy the time the second lift was due to arrive. SS
units and antiaircraft, hurriedly disengaged in Arnhem, were rushed to
the zones. Twenty Luftwaffe fighters, vectored in, continuously
strafed the sectors. Ground fighting was equally intense. To clear
parts of the heath of the encroaching enemy, the British, as they had
during the night and early morning, charged with fixed bayonets.

Mortar bursts, hitting gliders that had landed the day before, turned
them into flaming masses that in turn ignited the heath. Infiltrating
enemy units used some gliders as cover for their attacks and the
British set the machines on fire themselves, rather than let them fall
into enemy hands. Nearly fifty gliders blazed in a vast inferno on one
section of the field. Yet Brigadier Pip Hicks's Airlanding
Brigade--minus the half battalion that had been sent into Arnhem--was
managing with dogged courage to hold the zones. The paratroop and
glider landings, bringing in 2,119 men, were far more successful than
the men in the air or on the ground could believe. Even with the
battle underway, 90 percent of the lift was landing--and in the right
places.

Flight Sergeant Ronald Bedford, a rear gunner in a four-engined
Stirling, found Monday's mission far different from the one he had
flown on Sunday. Then, the nineteen-year-old Bedford had been frankly
bored with the routineness of the flight. Now, as they neared the
landing zone, firing was continuous and intense. Spotting an
antiaircraft battery mounted on a truck at the edge of the field,
Bedford tried desperately to turn his guns on it. He could see his
tracers curving down, and then the battery stopped firing. Bedford was
exuberant. "I got him!" he shouted. "Listen, I got him!" As the
Stirling held steady on its course, Bedford noticed that gliders all
around seemed to be breaking away from their tugs prematurely. He
could only assume that the heavy fire had caused many glider pilots to
release and try to get down as fast as possible. Then he saw the tow
rope attached to their own Horsa falling away. Watching the glider
swoop down, Bedford was sure it would collide with others before it
could land. "The

entire scene was chaotic," he recalls. "The gliders seemed to be going
into very steep dives, leveling off, and coasting down, often, it
looked, right into each other. I wondered how any of them would make
it."

Sergeant Roy Hatch, copiloting a Horsa carrying a jeep, two trailers
filled with mortar ammunition, and three men, wondered how they were
going to get down when he saw the antiaircraft fire ahead of them on
the run-in. As Staff Sergeant Alec Young, the pilot, put the glider
into a steep dive and leveled off, Hatch noticed to his amazement that
everyone seemed to be heading toward the same touch-down
point--including a cow which was frantically running just in front of
them. Somehow Young put the glider down safely. Immediately the men
jumped out and began unbolting the tail section. Nearby, Hatch noticed
three gliders lying on their backs. Suddenly, with a tearing, rasping
sound, another Horsa crash-landed on top of them. The glider came
straight in, sliced off the nose of Hatch's glider, including the
canopy and the cockpit where Hatch and Young had been sitting only
moments before, then slid forward, coming to a halt directly in front
of them.

Other gliders missed the zones altogether, some crash-landing as far as
three miles away. Two came down on the southern bank of the Rhine, one
near the village of Driel. Leaving casualties in the care of Dutch
civilians, the men rejoined their units by crossing the Rhine on the
forgotten but still active Driel ferry. * * The story is probably
apocryphal but the Dutch like to tell it. According to Mrs. Ter Horst
of Oosterbeek, when the British troopers and their equipment, including
an antitank gun, boarded the Driel ferry, Pieter was faced with a
dilemma: whether or not to charge them for the trip. By the time they
reached the northern bank, Pieter had decided to give them the ride
free.

Several C-47,'s were hit and set afire as they made their approach to
the zones. About ten minutes from landing, Sergeant Francis
Fitzpatrick noticed that flak was coming up thick. A young trooper,
Private Ginger MacFadden, jerked and cried out, his hands reaching for
his right leg. "I'm hit," MacFadden mumbled. Fitzpatrick examined him
quickly and gave him a shot of morphia. Then the sergeant noticed that
the plane seemed to be

laboring. As he bent to look out the window, the door to the pilot's
compartment opened and the dispatcher came out, his face tense. "Stand
by for a quick red and green," he said. Fitzpatrick looked down the
line of paratroopers, now hooked up and ready to go. He could see
smoke pouring from the port engine. Leading the way, Fitzpatrick
jumped. As his chute opened, the plane went into a racing dive.
Before Fitzpatrick hit the ground he saw the C-47 plow into a field off
to his right and nose over. He was sure the crew and Ginger MacFadden
had not escaped.

In another C-47 the American crew chief jokingly told Captain Frank D.
King, "You'll soon be down there and I'll be heading home for bacon and
eggs." The American sat down opposite King. Minutes later the green
light went on. King glanced over at the crew chief. He seemed to have
fallen asleep, slumped back with his chin on his chest, his hands in
his lap. King had a feeling something was not quite right. He shook
the American by the shoulder and the man fell sideways. He was dead.
Behind him, King saw a large hole in the fuselage which looked as
though it had been made by a .50-caliber machine-gun bullet. Standing
in the doorway ready to jump, King saw that flames were streaming from
the port wing. "We're on fire," he shouted to Sergeant Major George
Gatland, "Check with the pilot." Gatland went forward. As he opened
the cockpit door a sheet of flame shot out, sweeping the entire length
of the plane. Gatland slammed the door shut and King ordered the men
to jump. He believed they were now pilotless.

As the troopers went out the door, Gatland estimated the plane was
between two and three hundred feet off the ground. He landed with a
jar and began a head count. Four men were missing. One man had been
killed by gun fire in the doorway before he had a chance to leave the
plane. Another had jumped but his chute had caught fire; and a third,
Gatland and King learned, had landed a short distance away. Then the
fourth man arrived still in his parachute. He had come down with the
plane. The crew, he told them, had somehow crash-landed the plane and
they had miraculously walked away from it. Now, fifteen miles from

Oosterbeek and far from the British lines, King's group set out to make
their way back. As they moved out, the C-47, blazing a quarter of a
mile away, blew up.

In some areas paratroopers jumped safely only to find themselves
falling through waves of incendiary fire. Tugging desperately at
parachute lines to avoid the tracers, many men landed on the edges of
the zones in dense forests. Some, as they struggled to shed their
chutes, were shot by snipers. Others landed far away from their zones.
In one area, part of a battalion came down behind the Germans, then
marched for the rendezvous point bringing eighty prisoners with them.

Under fire on the zones, troopers, discarding their chutes, ran swiftly
for cover. Small clusters of badly wounded men lay everywhere.
Private Reginald Bryant was caught by the blast of a mortar shell and
so severely concussed that he was temporarily paralyzed. Aware of what
was happening around him, he could not move a muscle. He stared
helplessly as the men from his plane, believing Bryant dead, picked up
his rifle and ammunition and hurriedly struck out for the assembly
point.

Many men, surprised by the unexpected and unremitting machine-gun and
sniper fire that swept the zones, sprinted for cover in the woods. In
minutes the areas were deserted except for the dead and wounded.
Sergeant Ginger Green, the physical-training instructor who had
optimistically brought along a football to have a game on the zone
after the expected easy action, jumped and hit the ground so hard that
he broke two ribs. How long he lay there, Green does not know. When
he regained consciousness, he was alone except for casualties.
Painfully he sat up and almost immediately a sniper fired at him.
Green got to his feet and began to dart and weave his way toward the
woods. Bullets pinged all around him. Again and again, the pain in
his ribs forced Green to the ground. He was certain that he would be
hit. In the billowing smoke rolling across the heath, his strange duel
with the sniper went on for what seemed like hours. "I could only make
five or six yards at a time," he remembers, "and I figured I was up
against either a sadistic bastard or a damned bad

shot." Finally, hugging his injured ribs, Green made one last dash for
the woods. Reaching them, he threw himself into the undergrowth and
rolled against a tree just as a last bullet smacked harmlessly into the
branches above his head. He had gained vital yardage under the most
desperate circumstances of his life. Spent and aching, Green slowly
removed the deflated football from inside his camouflage smock and
painfully threw it away.

Many men would remember the first terrible moments after they jumped.
Running for their lives from bullets and burning brush on Ginkel Heath
at least a dozen troopers recall a young twenty-year-old lieutenant who
lay in the gorse badly wounded. He had been shot in the legs and chest
by incendiary bullets as he swung helplessly in his parachute.
Lieutenant Pat Glover saw the young officer as he moved off the zone.
"He was in horrible pain," Glover remembers, "and he just couldn't be
moved. I gave him a shot of morphia and promised to send back a medic
as soon as I could." Private Reginald Bryant, after recovering from
his paralysis on the drop zone, came across the officer as he was
heading for the assembly area. "When I got to him, smoke was coming
from wounds in his chest. His agony was awful. A few of us had come
upon him at the same time and he begged us to kill him." Someone,
Bryant does not remember who, slowly reached down and gave the
lieutenant his own pistol, cocked. As the men hurried off, the fire on
the heath was slowly moving toward the area where the stricken officer
lay. Later, rescue parties came across the body. It was concluded
that the lieutenant had committed suicide. * * Although numerous
witnesses confirm the story, I have withheld the officer's name. There
is still doubt that he shot himself. He was both popular and brave.
He may, indeed, have used his pistol, or he may have been killed by a
sniper.

With characteristic precision Brigadier Shan Hackett, commander of the
4th Parachute Brigade, landed within three hundred yards of the spot he
had chosen for his headquarters. in

spite of enemy fire, the Brigadier's first concern was to find his
walking stick, which he had dropped on the way down. As he was
searching for it, he came across a group of Germans. "I was more
scared than they were," he recalled, "but they seemed eager to
surrender." Hackett, who spoke German fluently, brusquely told them to
wait; then, recovering his stick, the trim, neatly mustached Brigadier
calmly marched his prisoners off.

Impatient, prickly and temperamental at best of times, Hackett did not
like what he saw. He, too, had expected the zones to be secure and
organized. Now, surrounded by his officers, he prepared to move out
his brigade. At this moment, Colonel Charles Mackenzie, General
Urquhart's chief of staff, drove up to perform his painful duty.
Taking Hackett aside, Mackenzie--in his own words--"told him what had
been decided and concluded with the touchy matter of command."
Brigadier Pip Hicks had been placed in charge of the division in
Urquhart's and Lathbury's absence. Mackenzie went on to explain that
Urquhart had made the decision back in England that Hicks was to take
over in the event both he and Lathbury should be missing or killed.

Hackett was none too happy, Mackenzie recalls. "Now look here,
Charles, I'm senior to Hicks," he told Mackenzie. "I should therefore
command this division." Mackenzie was firm. "I quite understand, sir,
but the General did give me the order of succession and we must stick
to it. Further, Brigadier Hicks has been here twenty-four hours and is
now much more familiar with the situation." Hackett, Mackenzie said,
might only make matters worse if he "upset the works and tried to do
something about it."

But it was obvious to Mackenzie that the matter would not end there. A
delicate rift had always existed between Urquhart and Hackett.
Although the volatile Brigadier was eminently fit for command, in
Urquhart's opinion he lacked the older Hicks's infantry experience.
Additionally, Hackett was a cavalryman, and Urquhart was known to hold
a lesser opinion of cavalry brigadiers than of the infantrymen with
whom he had long been associated. He had once jestingly referred to
Hackett in public as

"that broken-down cavalryman"--a remark that Hackett had not found
amusing.

Mackenzie told Hackett that his 11th Battalion was to be detached from
the brigade. It would move out immediately for Arnhem and the bridge.
To Hackett, this was the final insult. His pride in the brigade
stemmed, in part, from its qualities as a highly trained integrated
unit that fought as an independent team. He was appalled that it was
being separated and broken into parts. "I do not like being told to
give up a battalion without being consulted," he told Mackenzie hotly.
Then, on reflection, he added, "Of course, if any battalion should go,
it is the 11th. It has been dropped in the southeastern corner of the
zone and is closest to Arnhem and the bridge." But he requested
another battalion in exchange and Mackenzie replied that he thought
Hicks would give him one. And there the matter ended for the moment.
The brilliant, explosive and dynamic Hackett bowed to inevitability.
For the time, Hicks could run the battle, but Hackett was determined to
run his own brigade.

For the British it was a grim and bloody afternoon. With a
problem-ridden second lift, the fate of General Urquhart and Brigadier
Lathbury still unknown, with Colonel Frost's small force precariously
clinging to the north end of the Arnhem bridge, andwitha swelling clash
of personalities developing between two brigadiers, one more unforeseen
disaster had taken place.

Depleted in numbers, worn out by constant fighting, the troopers of
Hicks's Airlanding Brigade watched in despair as thirty-five Stirling
bomber-cargo planes dropped supplies everywhere but on the zones. Of
the eighty-seven tons of ammunition, food and supplies destined for the
men of Arnhem, only twelve tons reached the troops. The remainder,
widely scattered to the southwest, fell among the Germans.

In Antoon Derksen's house less than five miles away, General Urquhart
was still surrounded by Germans. The self-propelled

gun and crew on the street below were so close that Urquhart and the
two officers with him had not dared risk talk or movement. Apart from
some chocolate and hard candy, the men were without food. The water
had been cut off and there were no sanitary arrangements. Urquhart
felt a sense of desperation. Unable to rest or sleep, he brooded about
the progress of the battle and the arrival of the second lift, unaware
of its delayed start. He wondered how far Horrocks' tanks had advanced
and if Frost still held at the bridge. "Had I known the situation at
that moment," he later recalled, "I would have disregarded the concern
of my officers and made a break for it, Germans or no Germans." Silent
and withdrawn, Urquhart found himself staring fixedly at Captain James
Cleminson's mustache. "The enormity in hirsute handlebars had earlier
been lost on me," he wrote, "but now there was little else to look at."
The mustache irritated him. It looked "damned silly."

With all his preoccupation, Urquhart had never thought of the decision
he had made regarding chain of command within the division, a
last-minute instruction that was fast building toward a complex
confrontation between Hicks and Hackett. By now, at 4 P.m. on Monday,
September 18, Urquhart had been absent from his headquarters for almost
one full day.

General Wilhelm Bittrich, commander of the II SS Panzer Corps, was
shocked by the enormous size of the second lift. Badgered by Field
Marshal Model to quickly capture the Arnhem bridge and pressed by
Colonel Harzer and General Harmel for reinforcements, Bittrich found
his problems growing increasingly acute. As he grimly watched the
skies west of Arnhem blossom with hundreds of multicolored parachutes,
then fill with an apparently unceasing stream of gliders, he despaired.
From the Luftwaffe communications net, he learned that two other
massive drops had taken place. Trying to guess the Allied strength,
Bittrich greatly overestimated the number of Anglo-Americans

now in Holland. He believed that maybe another division had landed,
enough to tilt the balance in favor of the attackers.

To Bittrich, the buildup of Allied strength versus the arrival of
German reinforcements had become a deadly race. So far only a trickle
of men and mat@eriel had reached him. By comparison, the Allies seemed
to have inexhaustible resources. He feared that they might mount yet
another airborne drop the following day. In the narrow confines of
Holland, with its difficult terrain, bridges, and proximity to the
undefended frontiers of Germany, a force that size could mean
catastrophe.

There was little coordination between Bittrich's forces and Colonel
General Student's First Parachute Army to the south. Although
Student's men were being constantly reinforced by the remnants of Von
Zangen's Fifteenth Army, that shattered force was desperately short of
transport, guns and ammunition. Days, perhaps weeks, would be needed
to re-equip them. Meanwhile, the entire responsibility for halting
Montgomery's attack lay with Bittrich, and his most pressing problems
remained the crossing at Nijmegen and the unbelievable defense by the
British at the northern approach of the Arnhem bridge.

So long as the Allied troopers held out there, Bittrich was prevented
from moving his own forces down the highway to Nijmegen. Harmel's
Frundsberg Division, trying to get across the Rhine, was dependent
entirely on the ferry at Pannerden--a slow, tedious method of crossing.
Ironically, while the British at Arnhem were experiencing their first
tentative doubts of their ability to hang on, Bittrich was gravely
concerned about the outcome of the battle. He saw the Reich as
dangerously close to invasion. The next twenty-four hours might tell
the story.

Bittrich's superiors had problems of wider scope. All along Army Group
But's vast front, Field Marshal Model was juggling forces, trying to
stem the relentless attacks of the American First and Third Armies.
Although the reinstatement of the illustrious Von Rundstedt to his old
command had brought a renewal of order and cohesion, he was scraping
the bottom of the nation's manpower barrel for reinforcements.
Locating gasoline to move

units from one area to another was also becoming an increasingly
critical problem, and there was little help from Hitler's headquarters.
Berlin seemed more preoccupied with the Russian menace from the east
than with the Allied drive from the west.

Despite his other worries, Model seemed confident of overcoming the
threat in Holland. He remained convinced that the country's marshes,
dikes and water barriers could work for him in providing time to halt
and defeat Montgomery's attack. Bittrich had no such optimism. He
urged Model to take several important steps before the situation
worsened. In Bittrich's view, the destruction of the Nijmegen and
Arnhem bridges was necessary immediately, but that proposal irritated
Model every time Bittrich suggested it. "Pragmatic, always demanding
the impossible, Model visited me every day," Bittrich was to recall.
"On the spot, he would issue a stream of orders referring to immediate
situations, but he never stayed long enough at any conference to hear
out or approve long-range plans." Model, Bittrich feared, did not
grasp the appalling eventualities that could ensue for Germany if an
Allied breakthrough occurred. Instead, he seemed obsessed with
details; he was particularly concerned about the German failure to
recapture the Arnhem bridge. Stung by the implied criticism, Bittrich
told the Field Marshal, "In all my years as a soldier, I have never
seen men fight so hard." Model was unimpressed. "I want that bridge,"
he said coldly.

On the afternoon of the eighteenth Bittrich tried again to explain his
view of the over-all situation to an impatient Model. The Nijmegen
bridge was the key to the entire operation, he argued. Destroy it and
the head of the Allied attack would be severed from its body. "Herr
Field Marshal, we should demolish the Waal crossing before it is too
late," Bittrich said. Model was adamant. "No!" he said. "The answer
is no!" Not only did Model insist that the bridge could be defended;
he demanded that Student's army and the Frundsberg Division halt the
Anglo-Americans before they ever reached it. Bittrich said bluntly
that he was far from sure the Allies could be contained. As yet there
was almost no German armor in the area and, he told Model,

there was grave danger that Montgomery's overwhelming tank strength
would achieve a breakthrough. Then Bittrich expressed his fears that
further airborne drops could be expected. "If the Allies succeed in
their drive from the south and if they drop one more airborne division
in the Arnhem area, we're finished," he said. "The route to the Ruhr
and Germany will be open." Model would not be swayed. "My orders
stand," he said. "The Nijmegen bridge is not to be destroyed, and I
want the Arnhem bridge captured within twenty-four hours."

Others knew the difficulty of carrying out Model's commands.
Lieutenant Colonel Harzer, commander of the Hohenstaufen Division, had
run out of men. All his forces were fully engaged. No additional
reinforcements had arrived, and the size of the second lift posed grave
doubts as to the ability of his soldiers to halt and contain the enemy.
Like Bittrich, Harzer was convinced that "the Allies had dropped no
more than an airborne spearhead. I was sure that more would follow and
then they would drive for the Reich." With limited armor, Harzer did
not know whether he could stop the enemy. He had, however, succeeded
in making one place secure--the grounds of his own headquarters.
There, with cynical disregard for the rights of prisoners, he had
ordered several hundred British troopers to be held under guard in wire
enclosures. "I was quite sure," he was to recall, "that the R.a.f.
would not bomb their own troops."

Harzer, a self-professed Anglophile ("I had a real weakness for the
English"), had once studied as an exchange student in Great Britain.
He enjoyed sauntering among the prisoners trying to engage in
conversation to practice his English and, hopefully, to elicit
information. He was struck by the British morale. "They were
contemptuous and self-assured, as only veteran soldiers can be," he
recalled. The caliber of his prisoners convinced Harzer that the
battle was far from won. To keep Urquhart's forces off balance and to
prevent any kind of cohesive attack, he ordered his Hohenstaufen
Division on the evening of the eighteenth "to attack unceasingly at
whatever cost throughout the night."

The commander of the Frundsberg Division, General Harmel,

was "too busy to worry about what might happen next. I had my hands
full fighting the Lower Rhine." Charged with the capture of the Arnhem
bridge and the defense of the Waal crossing and the area in between,
Harmel's problems were far more acute than Harzer's. The move of his
division by ferry across the river was proceeding at a snail's pace.
Troops, equipment and tanks were loaded on makeshift rubber or log
rafts. Roads leading down to the water's edge had become quagmires.
Tanks and vehicles had slid off rafts, and some had even been swept
away. Worse, because of constant strafing by Allied planes, nearly all
ferrying and convoying operations had to take place during darkness.
In twenty-four hours Harmel's engineers had succeeded in moving only
two battalions with their vehicles and equipment into the
Arnhem-Nijmegen area. To speed up operations, truck shuttles carrying
troops ran back and forth between the south bank landing stage and
Nijmegen. But the movement was far too slow. To be sure, Harmel's men
were now in the center of Nijmegen and on the southern side of the
highway bridge, but he doubted that they could stop a determined attack
by the Anglo-Americans. Although he had been ordered not to destroy
it, Harmel was prepared for the eventuality. His engineers had already
laid charges and set up detonating apparatus in a roadside bunker near
the village of Lent on the northern bank. He hoped Bittrich would
approve the blowing of the highway and railroad bridges if they could
not be held. But if he did not, Harmel's decision was already made.
If British tanks broke through and started across, he would defy his
superiors and destroy the bridges.

The prosperous village of Oosterbeek seemed infused with a strange
mixture of gaiety and uneasiness. Like an island in the middle of the
battle, the village was assaulted by the noise of fighting on three
sides. From the drop zones to the west came the nearly constant
thunder of guns. To the northwest the chattering of machine guns and
the steady cough of mortars could be clearly heard in the flower-lined
streets, and to the east, two and a half miles away in Arnhem, black
smoke hung over the horizon, a somber backdrop to the unceasing timpani
of heavy artillery.

The bombing and strafing preceding the troop and glider landings on the
previous day had produced casualties among the villagers and some
damage to shops and houses, as had infiltrating snipers and
ill-directed mortar bursts, but the war had not so far made serious
inroads into Oosterbeek. The neat resort hotels, landscaped villas and
tree-lined streets were still largely untouched. Yet it was becoming
obvious with every hour that the fighting was coming closer. Here and
there, concussion from distant explosions splintered panes of glass
with startling suddenness. Charred particles of paper, cloth and wood,
carried like confetti by the wind, rained down into the streets, and
the air was acrid with the smell of cordite.

On Sunday Oosterbeek had been filled with troops as the British arrived
almost on the heels of a frantic German departure. No one had slept
during the night. A nervous excitement, heightened by the low whine of
jeeps, the clatter of Bren gun carriers and the tramp of marching men,
made rest impossible. Through-

out most of the eighteenth the movement had continued. The villagers,
joyous and yet apprehensive, had decked the streets and houses with
Dutch flags and plied their liberators with food, fruit and drink as
the British Tommies hurried through. To almost everyone the war seemed
all but over. Now, subtly, the atmosphere was changing. Some British
units were apparently firmly established in the village, and Lieutenant
Colonel Sheriff Thompson's artillery spotters occupied the tower of the
tenth-century Dutch Reformed church near the Rhine in lower Oosterbeek,
but troop movement had noticeably slowed. By late afternoon most
thoroughfares were disquietingly empty, and the Dutch noted that
antitank and Bren gun positions were now sited at strategic points on
the main road. Seeing them, villagers had a sense of foreboding.

As he walked through Oosterbeek trying to discover exactly what was
happening, Jan Voskuil recalls seeing a British officer ordering
civilians to take in their flags. "This is war," he heard the officer
tell one villager, "and you are in the middle of it." Throughout his
walk, Voskuil noted that the mood of the people was changing. From
Jaap Koning, a local baker, Voskuil learned that many Dutch were
pessimistic. There were rumors, Koning said, that "things are not
going well." Apprehension was replacing the heady sense of liberation.
"The British," Koning said, "are being pushed back everywhere."
Voskuil was profoundly concerned. Koning was always well informed, and
although his was the first bad news Voskuil had heard, it confirmed his
own fears. As each hour passed, Voskuil thought that the canopy of
shells screaming over the town toward Arnhem was growing heavier.
Remembering anew the terrible destruction of the Normandy villages,
Voskuil could not rid himself of an overwhelming feeling of
hopelessness.

A second tradesman, baker Dirk van Beek, was as depressed as Koning and
Voskuil. The news he had heard on his delivery rounds had dampened his
first excited reaction to the Allied drop. "What if the war comes
here--what will we do?" he asked his wife, Riek. But he already knew
the answer: he would remain

in Oosterbeek and keep on baking. "People have to eat," he told Riek.
"Anyway, where would we go if we left the shop?" Absorbing himself in
work, Van Beek tried to reassure himself that everything would work out
for the best. He had received his monthly allotment of wheat and yeast
a few days earlier. Now, determined to stay and to keep his shop open,
he remembered that an old baker had once told him of a method of making
bread that required less than half the usual amount of yeast. He
decided to stretch his supplies to the limit. He would continue to
bake until everything was gone.

At the Tafelberg, Schoonoord and Vreewijk Hotels it was obvious that
the battle had taken a serious turn: the airy, comfortable resorts were
being turned into casualty stations. At the Schoonoord British medics
and Dutch civilians began a full-scale house cleaning to make ready to
receive the wounded. Jan Eijkelhoff, of the underground, saw that the
Germans, in their hasty departure, had left the hotel "looking like a
pig pen. Food was all over the place. Tables had been overturned,
plates broken, clothing and equipment were scattered around. Papers
and rubbish littered every room." From surrounding houses extra
mattresses were brought in and placed on the ground floor. Rows of
beds were set up in the main reception rooms and stretchers were placed
along the glassed-in veranda. Every room, including the cellars, would
be needed by nightfall, the Dutch were told. Eijkelhoff learned that
St. Elisabeth's Hospital in Arnhem was already filled to capacity.
Yet the British medics with whom he worked remained optimistic. "Don't
worry," one of them told him, "Monty will be here soon."

At the Tafelberg Hotel, where Dr. Gerrit van Maanen was setting up a
hospital, seventeen-year-old Anje van Maanen, who had come to help her
father, noted the startling change in other volunteers. "We are
afraid," she wrote in her diary, "but we don't know why. We have a
queer feeling that weeks have passed between yesterday and today." As
at the Schoonoord, there were rumors at the Tafelberg that Montgomery's
forces were on the way. On the lookout for their quick arrival, Anje
wrote, "We stare

constantly out of the upstairs windows. The shooting is stronger.
There are lights and fires, but the great army is not here yet."

A few blocks away, the ornate twelve-room Hartenstein Hotel, sited amid
its parklike surroundings, wore a gaunt, deserted look. In Daliesque
disarray, tables and chairs were scattered across the fine green lawn
and among them, the result of a sharp fire fight the day before, lay
the crumpled bodies of several Germans.

As he cycled up to the building, twenty-seven-year-old William Giebing
was sickened by the appearance of the once elegant hotel. A few months
after he took possession of the building, leasing it from the town of
Oosterbeek in 1942, the Germans had moved into the village and
requisitioned the hotel. From that time on, Giebing and his wife,
Truus, were relegated to the position of servants. The Germans allowed
them to clean the Hartenstein and to oversee the cuisine, but the
management of the hotel was in German hands. Finally, on September 6,
Giebing was summarily ordered to leave, but his wife and two maids were
allowed to return each day to keep the place clean.

On the seventeenth, "crazy with joy at the landings," Giebing jumped on
a bicycle and set out for the Hartenstein from Westerbouwing, where his
father-in-law, Johan van Kalkschoten, operated the hilltop restaurant
overlooking the Heveadorp-Driel ferry. He was just in time to see the
last of the Germans departing. Running into the building, he felt for
the first time that "the hotel was finally mine." But the air of
desertion was unnerving. In the dining room two long tables covered
with white damask tablecloths were set for twenty. There were soup
bowls, silver, napkins and wine glasses and, in the center of each
table, a large tureen of vermicelli soup. Touching it, Giebing found
it still warm. In silver servers on the sideboard was the main course:
fried sole.

Giebing wandered from room to room looking at the rich, gold-covered
damask walls, the ornate plaster angels and garlands, the bridal suite
where gold stars speckled the sky-blue ceiling. The Germans, he was
relieved to find, had not looted the hotel. Not a

spoon was missing and the refrigerators were still full of food.
Making the rounds, Giebing heard voices coming from the veranda.
Rushing out he found several British soldiers drinking his sherry.
Eight empty bottles lay on the floor. Unaccountably, after all the
days of occupation, Giebing lost his temper. The Germans had, at
least, left his beloved hotel clean. "So this is the first thing you
do," he yelled at the troopers. "Break open my cellar and steal my
sherry." The British were embarrassed and apologetic, and Giebing was
mollified, but once again he was told he could not remain. However,
the British assured him that his property would be respected.

Now, a day later, hoping that the British had passed through and left
his hotel, Giebing returned. His heart sank as he approached the
building. Jeeps were parked in the rear of the building and, behind
the wire netting of the tennis courts, he saw German prisoners. Slit
trenches and gun positions had been dug in around the perimeter of the
grounds and staff officers seemed to be everywhere. Disheartened,
Giebing returned to Westerbouwing. In the afternoon his wife visited
the Hartenstein and explained who she was. "I was treated very
politely," she recalls, "but we were not permitted to move back. The
British, like the Germans, had requisitioned the hotel." There was one
consolation, she thought: the war would soon be over and then the
Giebings could truly operate what they considered the best hotel in
Oosterbeek. The courteous English officers with whom she talked did
not inform her that the Hartenstein, as of 5 P.m. on September 18, was
now the headquarters of the 1/ British Airborne Division.

In the strange mixture of anxiety and joy that permeated Oosterbeek,
one incident terrified many of the inhabitants more than the thought of
the encroaching battle. During the day prisoners had been released
from the Arnhem jail. Many were resistance fighters, but others were
dangerous convicts. In their striped prison garb, they flooded out of
Arnhem, and more than fifty ended up in Oosterbeek. "They added a
final touch of madness," recalls Jan ter Horst, a former Dutch army
artillery

captain, a lawyer and a leading member of the Oosterbeek resistance.
"We rounded the convicts up and put them temporarily in the concert
hall. But the question was, what to do with them? They seemed
harmless enough at the moment, but many of these felons had been
imprisoned for years. We feared the worst--especially for our women
folk--when they finally realized that they were free."

Talking with the convicts Ter Horst found that they wanted only to get
out of the immediate combat zone. The sole route across the Rhine was
by the Heveadorp-Driel ferry. Pieter, the ferryman, flatly refused to
cooperate. He did not want fifty convicts running loose on the
southern bank. Further, the ferry was now moored on the north side and
Pieter wanted it to remain there. After several hours of testy
negotiations, Ter Horst was finally able to get Pieter to take the
prisoners across. "We were glad to see them go," he remembers. "The
women were more scared of the convicts than they had been of the
Germans." Prudently Ter Horst insisted that the ferry be returned to
the northern bank, where it could be used by the British.

As a former army officer, Ter Horst was puzzled as to why the
Heveadorp-Driel ferry had not been immediately seized by the British.
When the troopers entered Oosterbeek he had questioned them about the
ferry. To his amazement, he discovered they knew nothing about it. A
former artilleryman, he was astounded that the British had not occupied
nearby Westerbouwing, the only high ground overlooking the Rhine.
Whoever held these heights with artillery controlled the ferry.
Further, the choice of the Hartenstein as British headquarters
disturbed him. Surely, he thought, the restaurant and its buildings on
the heights at Westerbouwing were a far preferable site. "Hold the
ferry and Westerbouwing," he urged several British staff officers.
They were polite, but uninterested. One officer told Ter Horst, "We
don't intend to stay here. With the bridge in our hands and the
arrival of Horrocks' tanks, we don't need the ferry." Ter Horst hoped
the man was right. If the Germans reached Westerbouwing, less than two
miles away, their guns not only could command

the ferry but could totally demolish British headquarters at the
Hartenstein. The British now knew about the ferry and they had been
briefed about Westerbouwing. There was little else Ter Horst could do.
The former Dutch officer had, in fact, pointed out one of the most
crucial oversights in the entire operation--the failure of the British
to realize the strategic importance of the ferry and the Westerbouwing
heights. Had General Urquhart stayed at his headquarters and in
control of the battle the situation might have been rectified in time.
* * The same point is made in several monographs written by the eminent
Dutch military historian, Lieutenant Colonel Theodor A. Boeree. "Had
Urquhart been there," he writes, "he might well have abandoned the
defense of the bridge, recalled Frost's battalion, if possible,
concentrated his six original batallions and the three of the 4th
Parachute Brigade that had just landed, and established a firm
bridgehead somewhere else on the northern side of Lower Rhine ... with
the high ground at Westerbouwing ... as the center of the bridgehead.
There they could have awaited the arrival of the British Second Army.

Brigadier Hicks, commanding the division in Urquhart's absence, was
facing almost hourly the bewildering problem of orienting himself to
the complex, constantly shifting moves of the hard-pressed airborne
unit. With the breakdown of radio communications between headquarters
and the battalions, there was little precise information about what was
happening, nor could Hicks gauge the strength and potential of the
enemy forces opposing him. What scant news reached him was brought by
spent, dirt-streaked messengers, who risked their lives to bring him
information, which was often hopelessly out of date by the time they
arrived at headquarters, or by the various members of the Dutch
underground, whose reports were often disregarded or viewed as suspect.
Hicks found himself depending strongly on one slender channel of
communication-- the tenuous Thompson-to-Munford artillery radio link
existing between Oosterbeek and Frost's forces at the bridge.

Mauled and battered, the 2nd Battalion and the valiant stragglers who
had reached it were still holding, but Frost's situation

had been desperate for hours and was deteriorating rapidly. "We were
getting constant messages from the bridge asking for relief and
ammunition," Hicks recalled. "Enemy pressure and the steadily
increasing strength of German armor was building everywhere, and there
was absolutely no contact with Urquhart, Lathbury, Dobie or Fitch. We
could not raise Browning at Corps headquarters to explain the gravity
of the situation, and we were desperate for help." From prisoner
interrogations Hicks now knew that the troopers were up against
battle-hardened SS men of the 9th Hohenstaufen and 10th Frundsberg
divisions. No one had been able to tell him how strong these units
were or to estimate the number of tanks that were being thrown against
him. Worse, Hicks did not know whether the original preattack plan
could withstand the present German pressure. If the enemy was heavily
reinforced the entire mission might founder.

Help, he knew, was coming. On the nineteenth, Major General Stanislaw
Sosabowski's Polish Brigade would arrive in the third lift. Horrocks'
tanks should also be arriving and were, indeed, already late. How
close were they to Arnhem and could they arrive in time to relieve and
balance the situation? "In spite of everything," Hicks recalls, "I
believed Frost would hold the northern end of the bridge until Monty's
tanks got to it. The bridge was still our objective, after all, and my
decisions and actions were centered solely on seizing and holding that
objective." Balancing all the factors, Hicks felt he must stick to the
original plan, and so did Brigadier Hackett at this time.

The original task of Hackett's 4th Parachute Brigade was to occupy the
high ground north of Arnhem to prevent German reinforcements from
reaching the bridge. But at the time that plan was conceived it was
thought that enemy strength would prove negligible and, at worst,
manageable. In fact, enemy reaction had been so fast, concentrated and
effective that Hicks could not assess the true situation. Bittrich's
corps held the north of Arnhem; his troops had bottled up Frost at the
bridge and successfully prevented Dobie and Fitch's battalions from
relieving them. The advance of these two units was now virtually
sheared

off. In the built-up areas around St. Elisabeth's Hospital barely a
mile or so from the bridge, the battalions were stopped in their
tracks. The South Staffordshires, already en route to help, and the
11th Battalion from Hackett's brigade were faring no better. "We now
came to the wide-open, exposed riverside stretch of road in front of
St. Elisabeth's Hospital, and then everything suddenly let loose,"
remembers Private Robert C. Edwards of the South Staffordshires. "We
must have looked like targets in a shooting gallery. All Jerry had to
do was line up his guns and mortars on this one gap--about a quarter of
a mile wide--and fire. He couldn't miss." Edwards saw Captain Edward
Weiss, second in command of his company, running tirelessly up and down
the column "totally ignoring all the metal flying about him, his voice
growing ever hoarser as he yelled out "On, on, on, D Company, on.""

Weiss seemed to be everywhere. Men were falling all around. If
troopers halted or hesitated, Weiss was immediately beside them urging
them on. You just couldn't crawl and watch him stand upright. You had
to follow his lead through that hell of fire." Edwards threw some
smoke bombs to try to hide their advance and "then put my head down and
ran like a hare." He stumbled over "heaps of dead, slithered in pools
of blood, until I reached the partial shelter afforded by houses and
buildings on the far side of the road." There he discovered that
Captain Weiss had been hit as he ran across. "Major Phillips had been
badly wounded. No one seemed to have much idea of what was going on or
what we should do next." As for D Company, when a count was made,
"only 20 percent remained, and quite obviously we couldn't continue
against such overwhelming German strength. Hopefully we waited for the
dawn."

It was as if a solid wall had been built between the division and
Frost's pitiful few at the bridge.

In exchange for his 11th Battalion, Hackett had been given the 7th
Battalion of the King's Own Scottish Borderers (Kosb's). They had
guarded the drop zones since landing on the seventeenth. Now they
moved out with Hackett's 10th and 156th bat-

talions via Wolfheze northwest of Oosterbeek. In that area the KOSB'S
would guard Johannahoeve Farm, a landing zone where transport and
artillery of the Polish Brigade were due to arrive by glider in the
third lift.

After the initial fighting on the zones, Hackett's brigade moved off
without incident, and by nightfall the KOSB'S had taken up positions
around Johannahoeve Farm. There, suddenly, the battalions ran into
heavy German opposition from strongly held machine-gun positions. A
pitched battle began. In the growing darkness, commands went out to
hold positions and then attempt to rout the enemy at dawn. It was
vitally important to secure the area. Sosabowski's paratroopers were
scheduled to land on the nineteenth on the southern side of the Arnhem
bridge, in the polder land that Urquhart and the R.a.f. had deemed
unsuitable--because of antiaircraft considerations--for the large-scale
initial landings. By the time the Poles were to arrive, it had been
expected that the bridge would be in British hands. If it was not, the
Poles had been assigned to take it. At Browning's rear Corps
headquarters in England, where no one was aware of the compounding
setbacks developing at Arnhem, the Polish drop was still scheduled to
take place as planned. If Frost could hold out and the Polish drop was
successful, there was still a chance even now that Market-Garden could
succeed.

Everywhere men were still struggling toward the bridge. On the lower
road that Frost had taken on what now seemed to many a long-ago day,
Private Andrew Milbourne and a small group of stragglers from other
battalions passed stealthily near the ruins of the railway bridge that
Frost's men had tried to capture on their march to the prime objective.
In fields to his left, Milbourne saw white mounds gleaming in the
darkness. "They were dozens of dead bodies, and the Dutch were moving
quietly around the area, covering our comrades with white sheets," he
recalls. Up ahead, fires reddened the sky and an occasional flash of
guns outlined the great bridge. All afternoon the little band had been
held up by

superior German forces. Now, once more, they were pinned down. As
they took refuge in a boathouse on the edge of the river, Milbourne
began to despair of ever reaching the bridge. A lone signalman in the
group began to work his radio set and, as the men gathered around, he
suddenly picked up the BBC from London. Milbourne listened as the
clear, precise voice of the announcer recounted the day's happenings on
the western front. "British troops in Holland," he reported, "are
meeting only slight opposition." In the gloomy boathouse someone
laughed derisively. "Bloody liar," Milbourne said.

Now, as the courageous men of the 1/ British Airborne Division fought
for their very existence, two of His Majesty's brigadiers chose to have
a heated argument over which of them should command the division. The
dispute was triggered by a smolderingly angry Brigadier Shan Hackett
who, by evening of the eighteenth, saw the situation as not only
disquieting but "grossly untidy." The enemy seemed to have the upper
hand everywhere. British battalions were scattered and fighting
uncohesively, without knowledge of one another's whereabouts. Lacking
communications, pinned down in built-up areas, many units came upon one
another quite by chance. It appeared to Hackett that there was no
over-all command or coordination of effort. Late in the evening, still
smarting over the startling announcement by Mackenzie concerning the
command of the division, the temperamental Hackett drove to the
Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek to have it out with Hicks. "He arrived
about midnight," Hicks recalls. "I was in the operations room, and
from the very beginning it was perfectly clear that, as he was senior
in grade to me, he was less than happy that I had been given command.
He was young, with firm ideas and rather argumentative."

Initially, Hackett's displeasure focused on the fact that Hicks had
detached the 11th Battalion from him. He demanded to know what orders
it had been given and who was in command of the sector. "He thought,"
recalls Hicks, "that the situation was too

fluid, and obviously disagreed with the decisions I had made."
Patiently the older Hicks explained that because of strong German
resistance, the present battle situation had been totally unforeseen.
Each battalion, therefore, was now fighting individually to reach the
bridge and, although instructed to follow specific routes, battalions
had been warned that due to the unusual conditions some overlapping
might occur. Two or more units might well find themselves forced into
the same vicinity. Hackett brusquely commented that "the command setup
was clearly unsatisfactory.

Hicks agreed, but the object, he told Hackett, "was to help Frost at
the bridge in whatever way we can and as fast as possible." While
agreeing that Frost had to be reinforced quickly, Hackett sarcastically
suggested that this might be done in a "more coordinated manner with
more drive and cohesion." There was much to be said for Hackett's
argument: a coordinated drive might indeed succeed in breaking through
the German ring and reaching Frost; but, lacking communications and
kept off balance by constant German attacks, Hicks had had little time
to organize such an all-out attack.

The two men then turned to the role that Hackett's brigade would play
the next day. In Hicks's view, Hackett should not attempt to occupy
the high ground north of Arnhem. "I felt he could aid Frost better by
driving into Arnhem and helping to hold the northern end of the
bridge." Hackett objected strongly. He wanted a definite objective,
and he appeared to know what it should be. He would take the high
ground east of Johannahoeve first, he announced, and then "see what I
can do to assist the operations in Arnhem." In the quiet, understated
but bitter verbal fencing, Hackett insisted that he be given a time
schedule so that he could relate "my actions to everyone else." He
wanted "a sensible plan." Otherwise, Hackett said, he would be
compelled "to raise the question of command of the division."

Lieutenant Colonel P. H. Preston, the headquarters administrative
officer, was present at what Hicks has since tactfully called "our
discussion." Preston remembers that Hicks, "his face tightly

drawn," turned to him and said, "Brigadier Hackett thinks he ought to
be in command of the division." Hackett protested the choice of words.
Preston, sensing that the conversation was becoming overly tense,
immediately left the room and sent the duty officer, Gordon Grieve, in
search of the chief of staff, Colonel Mackenzie.

In a room upstairs Mackenzie was resting, unable to sleep. "I had been
there about half an hour when Gordon Grieve came in. He told me that I
should come downstairs immediately, that the two Brigadiers, Hicks and
Hackett, "were having a flaming row." I was already dressed. On the
way down I tried to think quickly. I knew what the row was about and
that it might be necessary for me to take decisive action. I had no
intention of going into the operations room and exchanging
pleasantries. I felt at this point that General Urquhart's orders were
being questioned and I intended to back Hicks in everything."

As Mackenzie entered the room the conversation between the two
brigadiers abruptly ceased. "Both men had begun to compose
themselves," recalls Mackenzie, "and it was immediately clear that the
worst was over." Hicks, glancing up at Mackenzie, was almost casual.
"Oh, hello, Charles," Mackenzie remembers him saying, "Brigadier
Hackett and I have had a bit of a row, but it is all right now." Hicks
was certain that "things had settled back to normal. I was rather firm
with Hackett and when he left I knew he would follow my orders."
However much he may have appeared to accept Hicks's new role, Hackett's
view was largely unchanged. "I intended to take orders from Pip if
they made sense," he remembers. "What I was told to do was far from
that. Therefore, I was inclined to assert my position as senior
brigadier of the two and issue the sort of orders for my brigade's
operation which did make sense." * * I believe the row was far more
heated than related above, but understandably Hicks and Hackett, good
friends, are reluctant to discuss the matter in greater detail. There
are at least four different versions of what transpired, and none of
them may be entirely accurate. My reconstruction is based on
interviews with Hackett, Hicks and Mackenzie, and on accounts in
Urquhart's Arnhem, pp. 77-90, and Hibbert's The Battle of Arnhem, pp.
101-3.

Under any other circumstances, the confrontation between the brigadiers
would have been merely an historical footnote. Two courageous,
dedicated men, under intense strain and with identical aims, lost their
tempers for a moment. In the balance sheet of Market-Garden when the
plan was in such jeopardy and every soldier was needed if a coordinated
effort to seize the Arnhem bridge was to succeed, cooperation among
commanders and cohesion in the ranks were vital. Particularly so,
since the fate of the First Allied Airborne Army had taken yet another
turn: throughout the Market-Garden area, Field Marshal Von Rundstedt's
promised reinforcements were arriving from all over the western front
in a steady, unceasing flow.

Nicolaas de Bode, the highly skilled technician who had made the first
secret telephone connection for the underground between north and south
Holland, had remained in his room all day. On instructions from the
regional resistance chief Pieter Kruyff, De Bode sat by a small side
window which looked out on the Velper Weg the wide street leading from
the eastern side of Arnhem to Zutphen in the north. Although he had
not strayed from his post, calls had reached him from outlying areas to
the west and had deeply disturbed him. In the Wolfheze and Oosterbeek
areas, underground members reported trouble. The excited talk of
liberation had stopped. For some hours now, all he had heard was that
the situation was worsening. De Bode was asked to keep a constant
watch for any sign of heavy German movement from the north and east.
So far he had seen nothing. His messages, phoned to underground
headquarters hourly, contained the same terse information. "The road
is empty," he had reported again and again.

In the late evening, some twenty minutes before his next call, he heard
"the sound of armored cars running on rubber tires and the clanking of
armor." Wearily he walked to the window, and gazed up the Velper Weg.
The road seemed empty as before. Then in the distance, visible in the
fiery glow that hung over the

city, he saw two massive tanks coming into view. Moving side by side
along the wide street, they were heading straight down the road leading
into the old part of the city. As De Bode watched wide-eyed, besides
the tanks he saw trucks "carrying clean-looking soldiers, sitting
straight up on the seats with their rifles in front of them. Then,
more tanks and more soldiers in rows on trucks." Promptly he called
Kruyff and said, "It looks like an entire German army complete with
tanks and other weapons is heading straight into Arnhem."

The man who had warned London on September 14 about the presence of
Bittrich's II SS Panzer Corps, Henri Knap, Arnhem's underground
intelligence chief, was now receiving a steady stream of reports of
German reinforcements from his network. Knap abandoned caution. He
telephoned British headquarters at the Hartenstein directly and spoke
to a duty officer. Without preamble Knap told him that "a column of
tanks, among them some Tigers, is moving into Arnhem and some are
heading toward Oosterbeek." The officer politely asked Knap to hold
on. A few minutes later he came back on the line. Thanking Knap, he
explained that "the Captain is doubtful about the report. After all,
he's heard a lot of fairy tales." But the skepticism at British
headquarters quickly disappeared when Pieter Kruyff confirmed through
Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters, of the Royal Dutch Navy, acting
as an intelligence liaison officer for the division, that at least
"fifty tanks are heading into Arnhem from the northeast."

The stench of battle permeated the inner city. On the bridge, wreckage
jutted high above the concrete shoulders and littered streets along the
Rhine. Heavy smoke smeared buildings and yards with a greasy film.
All along the waterfront hundreds of fires burned unattended, and men
remember that the ground shook constantly from the concussion of heavy
explosives as the Germans, in the final hours of this second day of
battle, battered

British strongholds along the northern ramp in the bitter contest for
possession of Montgomery's prime objective.

Around midnight Lieutenant Colonel John Frost left his headquarters on
the western side of the ramp and made his way around the perimeter,
checking his men. Although the battle had continued almost without
letup since Gr@abner's armored attack during the morning, morale was
still high. Frost was proud of his tired, dirty troopers. All day
long they had doggedly repelled attack after attack. Not a single
German or vehicle had reached the north end of the bridge.

During the afternoon the Germans had changed their tactics. With
phosphorous ammunition, they attempted to burn the British out of their
strong points. A long-barreled 150 mm. gun hurled 100-pound shells
directly against Frost's headquarters building, forcing the men to the
cellar. Then British mortars got the range and scored a direct hit,
killing the gun crew. As the troopers cheered and hooted derisively,
other Germans rushed out under fire and towed the gun away. Houses
around the perimeter were burning fiercely, but the British held out in
them until the very last minute before moving to other positions.
Damage was awesome. Burning trucks and vehicles, wrecked half-tracks
and smoking piles of debris cluttered every street. Sergeant Robert H.
Jones remembers the sight as "a Sargasso sea of blazing collapsed
buildings, half-tracks, trucks and jeeps." The battle had become an
endurance contest, one that Frost knew his men could not win without
help.

Cellars and basements were filled with wounded. One of the battalion
chaplains, the Reverend Father Bernard Egan, and the battalion medical
officer, Captain James Logan--who had been friends since the North
African campaign --tended the casualties from a rapidly dwindling stock
of medical supplies. There was almost no morphia left and even field
dressings were almost gone. The men had set out for the bridge with
only enough light rations for forty-eight hours. Now, these were
almost exhausted, and the Germans had cut off the water. Forced to
scrounge for food, the troopers were existing on apples and a few pears
stored in the

cellars and basements of the houses they occupied. Private G. W. Jukes
remembers his sergeant telling the men, "You don't need water if you
eat lots of apples." Jukes had a vision of "being eventually relieved,
standing back-to-back defiantly in blood-stained bandages, surrounded
by dead Germans, spent cartridge cases and apple cores."

Hour after hour Frost waited vainly for Dobie's or Fitch's relieving
battalions to break through the German ring and reach the bridge.
Although sounds of battle came from the direction of western Arnhem,
there was no sign of large-scale troop movements. All through the day
Frost had expected some further word from Horrocks' XXX Corps. Nothing
had been heard from them since the single strong radio signal picked up
during the morning. Stragglers from the 3rd Battalion who had managed
to get through to Frost brought news that Horrocks' tanks were still
far down the corridor. Some had even heard from Dutch underground
sources that the column had not reached Nijmegen as yet. Worried and
uncertain, Frost decided to keep this information to himself. He had
already begun to believe that the men of his proud 2nd Battalion, which
he had commanded since its inception, would be alone far longer than he
believed it possible to hold.

In the last hours of Monday, Frost's hopes hinged on the third lift and
the expected arrival of Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski's 1/ Polish
Parachute Brigade. "They were to drop south of the bridge," Frost
later wrote, "and I dreaded the reception they would have ... but it
was important that they find a handful of friends to meet them." To
prepare for the Poles' arrival, Frost organized a "mobile storming
party." Using two of Major Freddie Gough's armored reconnaissance
jeeps and a Bren-gun carrier, Frost hoped to rush across the bridge
and, in the surprise and confusion of the assault, open a passage and
bring the Poles through. Major Gough, who was to lead the group, was
"thoroughly miserable and quite unenthusiastic about the idea." He had
celebrated his forty-third birthday on September 16. If

Frost's plan was carried out, Gough felt quite certain he would not see
his forty-fourth. * * After the war Gough learned that General
Horrocks had been thinking about a similar idea. Remembering how a
fast reconnaissance unit had gone ahead of the British column and
linked up with the 101/, he thought that a similar fast patrol might
well take its chances and reach the Arnhem bridge. "Colonel Vincent
Dunkerly was alerted to lead the group," Gough says, "and, like me, he
admitted that he spent the entire day peeing in his knickers at the
thought."

The Poles were not expected to land before 10 A.m., on the nineteenth.
Now, making his rounds of men in slit trenches, machine-gun
emplacements, basements and cellars, Frost warned them to save precious
ammunition. They were to fire only at close quarters, to make every
shot count. Signalman James Haysom was sighting his rifle on a German
when the Colonel's order was passed along. "Stand still, you sod,"
Haysom shouted. "These bullets cost money."

While Frost knew that reducing the rate of fire would help the enemy
improve his positions, he also believed that the Germans would be
misled into thinking the British had lost heart as well as numbers.
This attitude, Frost was certain, would cost the Germans dearly.

On the opposite side of the ramp, the little band of men with Captain
Eric Mackay was already proving Frost's theory.

In the scarred and pitted schoolhouse under the ramp, Mackay had
compressed his small force into two rooms and posted a handful of men
in the hall outside to ward off any enemy attempt at infiltration.
Mackay had barely positioned his men when the Germans launched a
murderous machine-gun and mortar attack. Lance Corporal Arthur Hendy
remembers the firing was so intense that bullets "whizzed through the
shattered windows, chopped up the floorboards and we dodged as many
flying splinters as we did actual bullets."

As men ducked for cover, Mackay discovered that the Germans had brought
up a flamethrower, and within minutes a demolished half-track near the
school was set afire. Then, Mackay recalls, "the Germans set fire to
the house to our north and it burned

merrily, sending down showers of sparks on our wooden roof which
promptly caught fire." In the pandemonium, men sprinted for the roof,
where for over three hours, using fire extinguishers from the school
and their own camouflage smocks, they worked frantically to extinguish
the flames. To Lance Corporal Hendy the stench was "like burning
cheese and burning flesh. The whole area was lit up. The heat in the
attic was intense and all the time the Germans were sniping away at us.
Finally the fire was put out."

As the exhausted troopers collected once again in the two rooms, Mackay
ordered his soldiers to bind their feet with their smocks and shirts.
"The stone floors were thick with glass, plaster and metal fragments
and the stairs were slippery with blood. Everything scrunched under
our feet and made a terrific racket." As Mackay was about to go to the
cellar to check on his wounded, he remembers "a blinding flash and a
terrific explosion. The next thing I knew, someone was slapping my
face." During the fire the Germans had brought up antitank
Panzerf@auste in an effort to demolish the little force once and for
all. With dazed disbelief Mackay saw that the entire southwest corner
of the school and part of the still-smoldering roof had been blown
away. Worse, the classrooms now resembled a charnel house with dead
and wounded everywhere. "Only a few minutes later," Mackay recalls,
"someone came over and said he thought we were surrounded. I looked
out one of the windows. Down below was a mass of Germans. Funnily
enough, they weren't doing anything, just standing around on the grass.
They were on all sides of us except the west. They must have thought
the Panzerf@auste had finished us off, because we had stopped
firing."

Making his way carefully around the bodies on the floor, Mackay ordered
his men to take up grenades. "When I yell "Fire!" open up with
everything you have," he said. Back at the southeast window, Mackay
gave the order. "The boys dropped grenades on the heads below and we
instantly followed up with all we had left: six Brens and fourteen Sten
guns, firing at maximum rate." In the din, paratroopers stood
silhouetted in the windows, firing

their machine guns from the hip and yelling their war cry, "Whoa
Mohammed." Within minutes the counterattack was over. As Mackay
recalls, "when I looked out again, all I could see below was a carpet
of gray. We must have wiped out between thirty and fifty Germans."

Now his men went about collecting the dead and wounded. One man was
dying with fifteen bullets in the chest. Five other men were
critically injured and almost all the troopers had sustained burns
trying to save the blazing roof. Mackay had also been hit again by
shrapnel and he discovered that his foot was pinned to his boot.
Neither Mackay nor Sapper Pinky White, the acting medical orderly,
could remove the metal and Mackay laced his boot tighter to keep the
swelling down. Out of fifty men, Mackay now had only twenty-one in
good shape; four were dead, and twenty-five wounded. Although he had
no food and only a little water, he had collected a plentiful supply of
morphia and was able to ease the pains of the injured. "Almost
everybody was suffering from shock and fatigue," he remembers, "but we
had gotten ourselves another temporary breathing space. I just didn't
think things looked too bright, but we'd heard the BBC and they told us
that everything was going according to plan. I got on the wireless to
the Colonel, gave in our strength return and said we were all happy and
holding our own."

As Lance Corporal Hendy tried to catch a few minutes' sleep he heard a
church bell off in the distance. At first he thought that it was
ringing to announce the approach of Horrocks' tanks, but the sound was
not measured and consistent. Hendy realized that bullets or shell
fragments must be hitting the bell. He thought of the men around
Colonel Frost's headquarters on the other side of the ramp and wondered
if they were holding safe. He heard the bell again and felt himself
shivering. He could not rid himself of an eerie, doomed feeling.

The help that Frost so urgently needed was agonizingly close--barely
more than a mile away. Four battalions spread between St. Elisabeth's
Hospital and the Rhine were desperately trying to reach him.
Lieutenant Colonel J. A. C. Fitch's 3rd Battalion had been attempting
to force its way along the Lion route--the Rhine river road that Frost
had used in reaching the bridge two days before. In darkness, without
communications, Fitch was unaware that three other battalions were also
on the move--Lieutenant Colonel David Dobie's 1/, Lieutenant Colonel G.
H. Lea's 11th, and Lieutenant Colonel W. D. H. McCardie's and South
Staffordshires; Dobie's men were separated from him by only a few
hundred yards.

At 4 A.m. on Tuesday, September 19, the 11th Battalion and the 2nd
South Staffs began to move through the heavily built-up area between
St. Elisabeth's Hospital and the Arnhem Town Museum. South of them,
on the Lion route, where Fitch had already encountered devastating
opposition, the 1/ Battalion was now attempting to push its way
through. Initially the three battalions, coordinating their movements,
gained ground. Then, with dawn, their cover disappeared. German
opposition, uneven throughout the night, was suddenly fiercely
concentrated. The advance ground to a halt as the battalions found
themselves in a tight net, trapped on three sides by an enemy who
seemed almost to have waited for them to arrive at a preplanned
position. And the Germans were prepared for a massacre.

Forward elements were hit and stopped in their tracks by German tanks
and half-tracks blocking the streets ahead. From the windows of houses
on the high escarpment of the railway marshaling yards to the north,
waiting machine-gun crews opened up. And from the brickworks across
the Rhine multibarreled flak guns, firing horizontally, ripped into
Dobie's battalion and flayed Fitch's men as they tried to move along
the lower Rhine road. Fitch's battalion, already badly mauled in the
fight-

+ since landing two days before, was now so cut to pieces by the
unremitting flak fire that it could no longer exist as an effective
unit. Men broke in confusion. They could go neither forward nor back.
With virtually no protection on the open road, they were methodically
mowed down. "It was painfully obvious," says Captain Ernest Seccombe,
"that the Jerries had much more ammunition than we did. We tried to
move in spurts, from cover to cover. I had just begun one dash when I
was caught in a murderous crossfire. I fell like a sack of potatoes.
I couldn't even crawl." Seccombe, who had been hit in both legs,
watched helplessly as two Germans approached him. The British captain,
who spoke fluent German, asked them to look at his legs. They bent
down and examined his wounds. Then one of the Germans straightened up.
"I'm sorry, Herr Hauptmann," he told Seccombe. "I'm afraid for you
the war is over." The Germans called their own medics and Seccombe was
taken to St. Elisabeth's Hospital. * * Throughout most of the Arnhem
battle, the hospital was used by both British and German doctors and
medics to care for their wounded. Seccombe, as a German prisoner, was
moved to the small Dutch town of Enschede, about five miles from the
German border. During his stay there, both legs were amputated. He
was liberated in April, 1945.

By chance one of Fitch's officers discovered the presence of Dobie's
forces on the lower road, and the men of the 1/ Battalion, despite
their own heavy casualties, hurried forward, toward the pitiable
remnants of Fitch's group. Dobie was now hell bent on reaching the
bridge, but the odds were enormous. As he moved up into the intense
fire and leapfrogged over Fitch's men, Dobie himself was wounded and
captured (he later succeeded in making his escape); by the end of the
day it was estimated that only forty men of his battalion remained.
Private Walter Boldock was one of them. "We kept trying to make it,
but it was a disaster. We were constantly mortared, and German tanks
whirled right up to us. I tried to get one with my Bren gun and then
we seemed to be going backwards. I passed a broken water main. A dead
civilian in blue overalls lay in the gutter, the water lapping gently
around his body. As we left the outskirts of Arnhem, I knew somehow we
wouldn't be going back."

Fitch's men, attempting to follow Dobie's battalion, were shredded once
again. The march had lost all meaning; after-action reports indicate
the total confusion within the battalion at this point. "Progress was
satisfactory until we reached the area of the dismantled pontoon
bridge," reads the 3rd Battalion's report. "Then casualties from the
1/ Battalion began passing through us. Heavy machine guns, 20 mm. and
intense mortar fire began ... casualties were being suffered at an
ever-increasing rate, and the wounded were being rushed back in small
groups every minute."

With his force in danger of total destruction, Fitch ordered his men
back to the Rhine Pavilion, a large restaurant-building complex on the
bank of the river, where the remnants of the battalion could regroup
and take up positions. "Every officer and man must make his way back
as best he can," Fitch told his troopers. "The whole area seems
covered by fire, and the only hope of getting out safely is
individually." Private Robert Edwards remembers a sergeant "whose
boots were squelching blood from his wounds, telling us to get out and
make our way back to the first organized unit we came to." Colonel
Fitch did not reach the Rhine Pavilion. On the deadly road back, he
was killed by mortar fire.

By an odd set of circumstances, two men who should never have been
there actually made their way into Arnhem. Major Anthony
Deane-Drummond, the second in command of Division signals, had become
so alarmed over the breakdown of communications that, with his
batman-driver, Lance Corporal Arthur Turner, he had gone forward to
discover the trouble. Deane-Drummond and Turner had been on the road
since early Monday. First they had located Dobie's battalion, where
they had learned that Frost was on the bridge and Dobie was preparing
an attack to get through to him. Setting off on the river road,
Deane-Drummond caught up with elements of the 3rd Battalion struggling
toward Arnhem and traveled with them. Heavy fire engulfed the group
and in the fighting that ensued Deane-Drummond found himself leading
the remnants of a company whose officer had been killed.

Under constant small-arms fire and so surrounded that Deane-Drummond
remembers the Germans were tossing stick grenades at the men, he led
the group along the road to some houses near a small inlet. Ahead, he
could see the bridge. "The last couple of hundred yards to the houses
I had decided on, the men were literally dropping like flies," he
recalls. "We were down to about twenty men, and I realized the rest of
the battalion was now far to the rear and not likely to reach us."
Dividing the men into three parties, Deane-Drummond decided to wait
until darkness, move down to the river, swim across it, then try to
recross and join Division to the west. In a small corner house with
the Germans all around, he settled down to wait. A banging began on
the front door. Deane-Drummond and the three men with him raced to the
back of the house and locked themselves in a small lavatory. From the
poise from outside the little room, it was clear that the Germans were
busy converting the house into a strong point. Deane-Drummond was
trapped. He and the others would remain in the tiny room for the
better part of three more days. * * Deane-Drummond was captured on
Friday, September 22, shortly after he left the house near the Arnhem
bridge. In an old villa near Velp, used as a P.o.w. compound, he
discovered a wall cupboard in which to hide. In these cramped
confines, he remained for thirteen days, rationing himself to a few
sips of water and a small amount of bread. On October 5 he escaped,
contacted the Dutch underground and on the night of October 22, was
taken to the 1/ Airborne Casualty Clearing Station at Nijmegen. One of
the three men with him in Arnhem, Deane-Drummond's batman, Lance
Corporal Arthur Turner, was also captured and taken to the velp house.
Eventually he was shipped to a P.o.w. camp in Germany and was liberated
in April, 1945. Deane-Drummond's own story is told most effectively in
his own book, Return Ticket.

Meanwhile, the 11th Battalion and the South Staffordshires, after
several hours of relentless street fighting, had also come to a
standstill. Counterattacking German tanks hammered the battalions,
forcing them to pull slowly back.

Private Maurice Faulkner remembers that elements of the battalions
reached the museum with heavy casualties, only to encounter the tanks.
"I saw one man jump out of a window on top of a tank and try to put a
grenade in," Faulkner recalls. "He was killed by a sniper, but I think
he was probably trapped anyway, and he may have figured that was the
only way out." Private

William O'Brien says that the situation was "suddenly chaotic. Nobody
knew what to do. The Germans had brought up those Nebelwerfer mortar
throwers and we were scared out of our minds at the screaming sound.
It began to seem to me that the generals had gotten us into something
they had no business doing. I kept wondering where the hell was the
goddam Second Army."

Private Andrew Milbourne, near the church at Oosterbeek, heard the call
go out for machine-gunners. Milbourne stepped forward and was told to
take his gun and a crew to the juncture of the road near St.
Elisabeth's Hospital to help cover and protect the two battalions as
they disengaged. Putting his Vickers machine gun in a jeep, Melbourne
set off with three others. Milbourne positioned his gun in the garden
of a house at the crossroads. Almost immediately he seemed to be
engulfed in his own private battle. Mortar bursts and shells appeared
to be aimed directly at him. As troopers began to fall back around
him, Milbourne sent a constant arc of bullets out in front of them. He
remembers hearing a rushing sound, like wind, and then a flash.
Seconds later he knew that something was wrong with his eyes and hands.
He remembers someone saying, "Lord, he's copped it."

Private Thomas Pritchard heard the voice and ran to where men were now
standing over Milbourne. "He was lying over the twisted Vickers with
both hands hanging by a thread of skin and an eye out of its socket.
We started yelling for a medic." Not far away Milbourne's best friend,
Corporal Terry "Taffy" Brace of the 16th Field Ambulance, heard someone
shout. Leaving a shrapnel case he had treated, Brace sprinted forward.
"Quick," a man called out to him, "the Vickers has caught it." As he
ran, Brace remembers, he could hear an almost steady sound of
machine-gun fire, and shells and mortars seemed to be dropping
everywhere. Approaching a cluster of men, he pushed his way through
and, to his horror, saw Milbourne lying on the ground. Working
frantically, Brace wrapped Milbourne's arms and put a dressing just
below the injured man's cheekbone to cushion his

left eye. Brace remembers talking constantly as he worked. "It's just
a scratch, Andy," he kept saying. "It's just a scratch." Picking up
his friend, Brace carried Milbourne to a nearby dressing station where
a Dutch doctor immediately set to work. Then he went back to battle.
* * Milbourne was later captured in the cellar of the Ter Horst house
in Oosterbeek. He lost his left eye and both hands were amputated by a
German surgeon in Apeldoorn. He spent the rest of the war in a
prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.

Brace passed what seemed to be hundreds of men lying in the fields and
along the road. "I stopped at every one," he recalls. "The only thing
I could do for most of them was take off their smocks and cover their
faces." Brace treated one injured sergeant as best he could and then
as he prepared to set out again, the man reached out to him. "I'm not
going to make it," he told Brace. "Please hold my hand." Brace sat
down and cupped the sergeant's hand in both of his. He thought of
Milbourne, his best friend, and of the many men who had come streaming
back through the lines this day. A few minutes later, Brace felt a
slight pull. Looking down, he saw that the sergeant was dead.

By now the British were in confusion, without antitank guns, out of
Piat ammunition and suffering heavy casualties. The attack had become
a shambles. The two battalions could not drive beyond the built-up
areas around St. Elisabeth's Hospital. But in that maze of streets
one action was both positive and successful. The attack had overrun a
terrace house at Zwarteweg 14, the building from which General Roy
Urquhart had been unable to escape.

"We heard the wheeze of the self-propelled gun outside and the rattle
of its track," Urquhart later wrote. "It was moving off." Antoon
Derksen then appeared and "announced excitedly that the British were at
the end of the road. We ran down the street and I thanked God we had
made contact again."

Urquhart, learning from an officer of the South Staffordshires that his
headquarters was now in a hotel called the Hartenstein in Oosterbeek,
commandeered a jeep and, driving at full speed through a constant hail
of sniper fire, at last reached Division.

The time was 7:25 A.m. He had been absent and lacking control of the
battle in its most crucial period, for almost thirty-nine hours.

At the Hartenstein, one of the first men to see Urquhart was Chaplain
G. A. Pare. "The news had not been so good," he recalls. "The General
had been reported a prisoner and there was no sign of the Second Army."
As Pare came down the steps of the hotel "who should be ascending but
the General. Several of us saw him, but nobody said a word. We just
stared--completely taken aback." Dirty and with "two days' beard on my
face I must have been something to see," Urquhart says. At that moment
Colonel Charles Mackenzie, the chief of staff, came rushing out.
Staring at Urquhart, Mackenzie told him, "We had assumed, sir, that you
had gone for good."

Quickly Mackenzie briefed the anxious Urquhart on the events that had
occurred during his absence and gave him the situation--as Division
knew it--at the moment. The picture was appalling. Bitterly, Urquhart
saw that his proud division was being scattered and cut to ribbons. He
thought of all the setbacks that had dogged his Market forces: the
distance from the drop zones to the bridge; the near-total breakdown of
communications; the weather delay of Hackett's 4th Brigade plus the
loss of precious resupply cargo; and the slow progress of Horrocks'
tanks. Urquhart was stunned to learn that XXX Corps was not reported
to have reached even Nijmegen as yet. The command dispute between
Hackett and Hicks was upsetting, particularly as it stemmed from
Urquhart's and Lathbury's own unforeseeable absence in the crucial
hours when precise direction was required in the battle. Above all,
Urquhart rued the incredible overoptimism of the initial planning
stages that had failed to give due importance to the presence of
Bittrich's Panzer Corps.

All these factors, one compounding another, had brought the division
close to catastrophe. Only superb discipline and unbelievable courage
were holding the battered Red Devils together. Urquhart was determined
to somehow instill new hope, to coordinate the efforts of his men down
even to company level. In doing

so, he knew that he must demand more of his weary and wounded men than
any airborne commander ever had demanded. He had no choices. With the
steady inflow of German reinforcements, the dedicated, soft-spoken
Scotsman saw that unless he acted immediately "my division would be
utterly destroyed." Even now, it might be too late to save his beloved
command from annihilation.

A look at the map told its own desperate story. Quite simply, there
was no front line. Now that all his troopers but the Polish Brigade
had arrived, the main dropping zones to the West had been abandoned
and, apart from resupply areas, the lines around them held by Hicks's
men had been shortened and pulled in. Hackett was going for the high
ground northeast of Wolfheze and Johannahoeve Farm, he saw. The 11th
Battalion and the South Staffordshires were fighting near St.
Elisabeth's Hospital. There was no news of the progress of the 1/ and
3rd battalions on the lower Rhine road. Yet Frost, Urquhart learned
with pride, still held at the bridge. Everywhere on the situation map
red arrows indicated newly reported concentrations of enemy tanks and
troops; some actually appeared to be positioned behind the British
units. Urquhart did not know if there was time enough remaining to
reorganize and coordinate the advance of his dwindling forces and send
them toward the bridge in one last desperate drive. Ignorant for now
of the cruel damage done to the 1/ and 3rd battalions, Urquhart
believed there might still be a chance.

"The thing that hit me was this," he remembers. "Who was running the
battle in the town? Who was coordinating it? Lathbury was wounded and
no longer there. No one had been nominated to make a plan." As he
began to work on the problem Brigadier Hicks arrived. He was extremely
happy to see Urquhart and to return the division to his care. "I told
him," Urquhart says, "that we would have to get somebody into town
immediately. A senior officer, to coordinate Lea and McCardie's
attack. I realized that they had been only a few hundred yards away
from me, and it would have been better if I had remained in town to
direct. Now, I sent Colonel Hilary Barlow, Hicks's deputy. He was
the

man for the job. I told him to get into town and tie up the loose
ends. I explained exactly where Lea and McCardie were and sent him off
with a jeep and wireless set and ordered him to produce a properly
coordinated attack."

Barlow never reached the battalions. Somewhere en route he was killed.
"He simply vanished," Urquhart recalls, and the body was never
found.

The arrival of the Poles in the third lift was of almost equal urgency.
They would now land directly on a prepared enemy on the southern
approaches of the bridge, as Frost knew only too well; and by now,
Urquhart reasoned, the Germans were obviously reinforced by armor. The
drop could be a slaughter. In an effort to stop them and even though
communications were uncertain--no one knew whether messages were
getting through--Urquhart sent a warning message and requested a new
drop zone. At rear Corps headquarters the signal was never received.
But it was irrelevant. In yet another setback, fog covered many of the
airfields in England where the planes and gliders of the vital third
lift were readying to go.

The corridor through which Horrocks' tanks had to drive was open once
again. At Son, forty-six miles south of Arnhem, engineers watched the
first British armor thud across the temporary Bailey bridge they had
erected. The Guards Armored Division was once more on its way, the
drive now led by the Grenadiers. Now, at 6:45 A.m. on September 19,
the Garden forces were behind schedule by thirty-six hours.

No one in this sector of the corridor could guess as yet what that time
loss would mean in the final reckoning--and worse was to come. The
great Waal bridge at Nijmegen, thirty-five miles north, was still in
German hands. If it was not taken intact and soon, airborne commanders
feared the Germans would blow it up.

That fear gave urgency to the armored drive. To General Gavin, General
Browning, the Corps commander, and to Horrocks, the Nijmegen bridge was
now the most critical piece in the

plan. As yet the commanders did not know the true plight of the 1/
British Airborne Division. German propaganda broadcasts had boasted
that General Urquhart was dead * and his division smashed, but there
had been no news at all from Division itself. In the tank columns men
believed that Market-Garden was going well. So did General Taylor's
Screaming Eagles. "To the individual 101/ trooper, the sound of the
tanks, the sight of their guns was both an assurance and a promise,"
General S. L. A. Marshall was later to write--"an assurance that there
was a plan and a promise that the plan might work." * According to
Bittrich the Germans learned from P.o.w.'s that Urquhart was either
dead or missing and also, he claims, "we were monitoring radio messages
and listening to phone calls."

As the tanks rumbled by, the watching troopers of General Taylor's 101/
took just pride in their own achievements. Against unexpectedly strong
resistance they had taken and held the fifteen-mile stretch of road
from Eindhoven up to Veghel. Along the route men waved and cheered as
armored cars of the Household Cavalry, the tanks of the Grenadiers and
the mighty mass of XXX Corps swept by. In minutes the column moved
from Son to Veghel. Then, with the kind of dash that Montgomery had
envisioned for the entire drive, the armored spearhead, flanked by
cheering, flag-waving Dutch crowds, sped on, reaching its first
destination at Grave at 8:30 A.m. There, the tanks linked up with
Gavin's 82nd. "I knew we had reached them," recalls Corporal William
Chennell, who was in one of the lead armored cars, "because the
Americans, taking no chances, halted us with warning fire."

Moving quickly on, the first tanks reached the Nijmegen suburbs at
midday. Now two thirds of the vital Market-Garden corridor had been
traversed. The single road, jammed with vehicles, could have been
severed at any time had it not been for the vigilant, tenacious
paratroopers who had fought and died to keep it open. If Montgomery's
bold strategy was to succeed, the corridor was the lifeline which alone
could sustain it. Men felt the heady excitement of success. According
to official pronounce-

ts, including those from Eisenhower's headquarters, everything was
going according to plan. There was not even a hint of the dire
predicament that was slowly engulfing the men at Arnhem.

Yet, General Frederick Browning was uneasy. During the afternoon of
the eighteenth he met with General Gavin. The Corps commander had
received no news from Arnhem. Other than scant Dutch underground
information, Browning's communications men had not received a single
situation report. Despite official announcements that the operation
was proceeding satisfactorily, messages relayed to Browning from his
own rear headquarters and from General Dempsey's Second Army had roused
in him a gnawing concern. Browning could not rid himself of the
feeling that Urquhart might be in grievous trouble.

Two reports in particular fed his anxiety. German strength and
reaction in Arnhem had unquestionably proved heavier and faster than
the planners had ever anticipated. And R.a.f. photo-reconnaissance
information indicated that only the northern end of the Arnhem bridge
was held by the British. But even now, Browning was unaware that two
panzer divisions were in Urquhart's sector. Disturbed by the lack of
communications and nagged by his suspicions, Browning warned Gavin that
the "Nijmegen bridge must be taken today. At the latest, tomorrow."
From the moment he had first learned of Market-Garden, the bridge at
Arnhem had worried Browning. Montgomery had confidently expected
Horrocks to reach it within forty-eight hours. At the time, Browning's
view was that Urquhart's paratroopers could hold for four days. Now,
on D plus two--one day short of Browning's estimate of the division's
ability to function alone--although unaware of the grave condition of
the 1/ British Airborne Division, Browning told Gavin, "we must get to
Arnhem as quickly as possible." * * Many British accounts of Arnhem,
including Chester Wilmot's excellent Struggle for Europe, imply that
Browning knew more about Urquhart's situation at this time than he
actually did. A careful check of the scattered and inconclusive
information passed on to Corps headquarters shows that the first direct
message from the Arnhem sector reached Browning at 8:25 A.m. on the
nineteenth. Two others arrived during the course of the day and dealt
with the bridge, troop locations and a request for air support.
Although many messages giving the true picture had been sent, they had
not been received, and these three gave no indication that Urquhart's
division was being methodically destroyed. In some quarters,
Montgomery and Browning have been unjustly criticized for not taking
more immediate and positive steps. At this time they knew virtually
nothing of Urquhart's critical problems.

Immediately after the link-up in the 82nd's sector, Browning called a
conference. The Guards' lead armored cars were sent back to pick up
the XXX Corps commander, General Horrocks, and the commander of the
Guards Armored Division, General Allan Adair. With Browning, the two
officers drove to a site northeast of Nijmegen, overlooking the river.
From there Corporal William Chennell, whose vehicle had picked up one
of the two officers, stood with the little group observing the bridge.
"To my amazement," Chennell remembers, "we could see German troops and
vehicles moving back and forth across it, apparently completely
unconcerned. Not a shot was fired, yet we were hardly more than a few
hundred yards away."

Back at Browning's headquarters, Horrocks and Adair learned for the
first time of the fierce German opposition in the 82nd's area. "I was
surprised to discover upon arrival that we did not have the Nijmegen
bridge," Adair says. "I assumed it would be in airborne hands by the
time we reached it and we'd simply sweep on through." Gavin's
troopers, the generals now learned, had been so hard-pressed to hold
the airhead that companies had been recalled from Nijmegen to protect
the landing zones from massed enemy assaults. Elements of the 508th
Battalion had been unable to make any headway against the strong SS
units holding the bridge approaches. The only way to take the bridge
quickly, Browning believed, was by a combined tank and infantry
assault. "We're going to have to winkle these Germans out with more
than airborne troops," Browning told Adair.

The Nijmegen bridge was the last crucial link in the Market-Garden
plan. With the time limit that Browning had placed on the British
paratroopers' ability to hold out about to expire, the pace of the
operation must be accelerated. Eleven miles of corridor remained to be
forced open. The Nijmegen bridge, Browning stressed, had to be
captured in record time.

Major General Heinz Harmel, the Frundsberg Division commander, was
irritable and more than a little frustrated. Despite constant pressure
from General Bittrich, he had still been unable to bludgeon Frost and
his men from the Arnhem bridge. "I was beginning to feel damn
foolish," Harmel recalls.

By now he knew that the paratroopers were nearing the end of their
supplies and ammunition. Also their casualties, if his own were an
example, were extremely high. "I had determined to bring tanks and
artillery fire to bear and level every single building they held,"
Harmel says, "but in view of the fight they were putting up, I felt I
should first ask for their surrender." Harmel ordered his staff to
arrange for a temporary truce. They were to pick a British prisoner of
war to go to Frost with Harmel's ultimatum. The soldier selected was a
newly captured engineer, twenty-five-year-old Sergeant Stanley
Halliwell, one of Captain Mackay's sappers.

Halliwell was told to enter the British perimeter under a flag of
truce. There he was to tell Frost that a German officer would arrive
to confer with him about surrender terms. If Frost agreed, Halliwell
would once more return to the bridge to stand unarmed with Frost until
the German officer joined them. "As a P.o.w. I was supposed to return
to the Jerries as soon as I delivered the message and got the Colonel's
answer and I didn't like that part of the business at all," Halliwell
says. The Germans brought Halliwell close to the British perimeter,
where, carrying the truce flag, he crossed into the British-held sector
and arrived at Frost's headquarters. Nervously, Halliwell explained
the situation to Frost. The Germans, he said, believed it pointless
for the fight to continue. The British were surrounded with no hope of
relief. They had no choice but to die or surrender. Questioning
Halliwell, Frost learned that "the enemy seemed to be most disheartened
at their own losses." His own spirits lifted momentarily at the news,
and he remembers thinking that "if only more

ammunition would arrive, we would soon have our SS opponents in the
bag." As to the German request for negotiations, Frost's answer to
Halliwell was explicit. "Tell them to go to hell," he said.

Halliwell was in full agreement. As a P.o.w. he was expected to
return, but he did not relish the idea of repeating the Colonel's exact
words and, he pointed out to Frost, it might prove difficult to return
through the lines. "It is up to you to make that decision," Frost
said. Halliwell had already done so. "If it's all the same with you,
Colonel," he told Frost, "I'll stay. Jerry will get the message sooner
or later."

On the far side of the ramp Captain Eric Mackay had just received a
similar invitation, but he chose to misinterpret it. "I looked out and
saw a Jerry standing with a not-very-white hanky tied to a rifle. He
shouted "Surrender!" I promptly assumed that they wanted to surrender,
but perhaps they meant us." In the now nearly demolished schoolhouse
in which his small force was holding out, Mackay, still thinking the
German was making a surrender offer, thought the whole idea
impractical. "We only had two rooms," he says. "We would have been a
bit cramped with prisoners."

Waving his arms at the German, Mackay shouted, "Get the hell out of
here. We're taking no prisoners." The medical orderly, Pinky White,
joined Mackay at the window. "Raus!" he shouted. "Beat it!" Amid a
series of hoots and catcalls, other troopers took up the cry. "Bugger
off! Go back and fight it out, you bastard." The German seemed to get
the point. As Mackay recalls, he turned around and walked quickly back
to his own building, "still waving his dirty hanky."

Harmel's attempt to seek a surrender from the spirited, beleaguered men
on the bridge had failed. The battle began again in all its fury.

At fog-covered bases near Grantham, England, the 1/ Polish Parachute
Brigade was waiting to take off. Zero hour for the drop had been
scheduled for 10 A.m., but weather had forced a five-hour postponement.
The brigade was now due to come in at 3 P.m. Major General Stanislaw
Sosabowski, the Poles' fiercely independent, mercurial commander, had
kept his men by their planes during the wait. It seemed to the
fifty-two-year-old Sosabowski that England was fogged in every morning.
If the weather cleared more quickly than expected, orders might change
and Sosabowski intended to be ready to go on short notice. He felt
that every hour mattered now. Urquhart, Sosabowski believed, was in
trouble.

Apart from instinct, there was no specific reason for Sosabowski's
feeling. But the Market-Garden concept had not appealed to him from
the outset. He was certain that the drop zones were too far from the
bridge to effect surprise. Further, no one in England appeared to know
what was happening in Arnhem, and Sosabowski had been alarmed to
discover at headquarters that communications with the 1/ British
Airborne Division had broken down. All that was known was that the
north end of the Arnhem bridge was in British hands. Since there had
been no change in the plan, Sosabowski's men, dropping to the south
near the village of Elden, would take the other end.

But the General was worried about the lack of information. He could
not be sure that Urquhart's men were still on the bridge. Liaison
officers from Browning's rear headquarters, on whom Sosabowski was
dependent for news, seemed to know little about

what was actually happening. He had thought of going to First Allied
Airborne Army Headquarters at Ascot to talk directly with General Lewis
Brereton, the commanding officer. Protocol dictated otherwise. His
troops were under General Browning's command, and Sosabowski was
reluctant to bypass military channels. Any alterations in the plan
should come only from Browning, and none had been received. Yet,
Sosabowski felt that something had gone wrong. If the British were
holding only the north end of the bridge, the enemy had to be in
strength to the south and the Poles might well have the fight of their
lives. Sosabowski's transport and artillery, due to leave in forty-six
gliders from the southern Down Ampney and Torrant Rushton bases, were
still scheduled for a midday takeoff. Since that part of the plan
remained unchanged, Sosabowski tried to convince himself that all would
go well.

Lieutenant Albert Smaczny was equally uneasy. He was to lead his
company across the Arnhem bridge and occupy some buildings in the
eastern part of the city. If the bridge had not been captured, he
wondered how he would put his men across the Rhine. Smaczny had been
assured that the crossing would be in British hands, but ever since his
escape from the Germans in 1939 (his sixteen-year-old brother had been
shot by the Gestapo in reprisal) Smaczny had schooled himself "to
expect the unexpected."

Hour after hour the Poles waited, while the fog in the Mid-lands
persisted. Corporal Wladijslaw Korob "was beginning to get nervous. I
wanted to go," he remembers. "Standing around the airdrome wasn't my
idea of the best way to kill Germans." Looking at the assemblage of
planes on the field, Lieutenant Stefan Kaczmarek felt "a joy that
almost hurt." He, too, was getting tired of standing around idle. The
operation, he told his men, "is the second-best alternative to
liberating Warsaw. If we succeed, we'll walk into Germany right
through the kitchen."

But the Poles were to be disappointed. At noon Sosabowski received
fresh orders. Although planes were operating from the southern fields,
in the Midlands the bases remained weathered in.

The jump was canceled for the day. "It's no good, General," the chief
liaison officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Stevens, told the protesting
Sosabowski. "We can't get you out." The assault was postponed until
the following morning, Wednesday, September 20. "We'll try it then at
10 A.m.," he was told. There was no time to transfer troop loads to
bases in the south. To Sosabowski's chagrin, he learned that his
glider supply lift had already left and was on the way to Holland. The
General fumed with impatience. Each hour that passed meant greater
enemy resistance, and the following day might bring an infinitely
harder fight--unless his nagging fears were completely unjustified.

They were not. Sosabowski's glider supply lift with men, artillery and
transport was heading for near annihilation. The third air lift would
be a disaster.

Low-scudding clouds blanketed the southern route all the way across the
Channel. The third lift, heading for the 101/, 82nd and British drop
zones, encountered trouble right from the beginning. Clear weather had
been predicted by afternoon. Instead, conditions were deteriorating
even as the formations took to the air. Squadrons of fighters, caught
in cloud and unable to see ground targets, were forced to turn back.
In zero visibility, unable to see their tow planes, many gliders cut
loose to make emergency landings in England or in the Channel and whole
serials were forced to abort and return to base.

Of the 655 troop carriers and 431 gliders that did take off, little
more than half reached the drop and landing zones, although most of the
plane-glider combinations carrying troops were able to land safely back
in England or elsewhere. But over the Continent intense enemy ground
fire and Luftwaffe attacks, combined with the poor weather, caused the
loss of some 112 gliders and 40 transports. Only 1,341 out of 2,310
troops and only 40 out of 68 artillery pieces bound for the 101/
Airborne Division got through. So hard-pressed were General Taylor's
men that the 40 guns went into action almost as soon as they landed.

General Gavin's 82nd Airborne fared even worse. At this time, when
every trooper was needed for the attack on the critical Nijmegen
bridges, Gavin's 325th Glider Infantry Regiment did not arrive at all.
Like the Polish paratroops, the 325th's planes and gliders, also based
in the Grantham area, were unable to leave the ground. Worse, out of
265 tons of stores and ammunition destined for the 82nd, only about 40
tons were recovered.

In the British sector, where Urquhart was expecting not only the Poles
but a full-cargo resupply mission, tragedy struck. The supply dropping
zones had been overrun by the enemy, and although intensive efforts
were made to divert the 163-plane mission to a new area south of the
Hartenstein Hotel, the effort failed. Desperately short of everything,
particularly ammunition, Urquhart's men saw the formations approach
through a blizzard of antiaircraft fire. Then enemy fighters appeared,
firing on the formations and strafing the new supply dropping zones.

At about 4 P.m., the Reverend G. A. Pare, chaplain of the Glider Pilot
Regiment, heard the cry, "Third lift coming!" Suddenly, the chaplain
remembers, "there was the most awful crescendo of sound and the very
air vibrated to a tremendous barrage of guns. All we could do was gaze
in stupefaction at our friends going to inevitable death."

Pare watched "in agony, for these bombers, used to flying at 15,000
feet at night, were coming in at 1,500 feet in daylight. We saw more
than one machine blazing, yet carrying on its course until every
container was dropped. It now became obvious to us that we had
terrible opposition. A signal had been sent asking that supplies be
dropped near our headquarters, but hardly anything did."

Without fighter escort and doggedly holding course, the unwavering
formations released supplies on the old dropping zones. Men on the
ground tried desperately to attract attention by firing flares,
igniting smoke bombs, waving parachutes and even setting parts of the
heath on fire--and as they did they were strafed by diving enemy
Messerschmitts.

Many soldiers recall one British Dakota, its starboard wing on

fire, coming in over the drop zone now held by the Germans. Sergeant
Victor Miller, one of the glider pilots who had landed in the first
lift on Sunday, was "sick at heart to see flames envelop almost the
whole of the lower half of the fuselage." Watching for the crew to
bail out, Miller found himself muttering, "Jump! Jump!" As the plane
flew low, Miller saw the dispatcher standing in the door, pushing out
containers. Mesmerized, he watched the flaming Dakota turn and make
another run in, and through the smoke he saw more containers tumbling
out. Sergeant Douglas Atwell, another glider pilot, remembers that men
climbed out of their trenches staring silently at the sky. "We were
dead tired, and we had little to eat or drink, but I couldn't think of
anything but that plane at the moment. It was as if it was the only
one in the sky. Men were just riveted where they stood--and all the
time that dispatcher kept on pushing out bundles." The pilot held his
burning plane steady, making a second slow pass. Major George Powell
"was awestruck that he would do this. I couldn't take my eyes off the
craft. Suddenly it wasn't a plane any more, just a big orange ball of
fire." As the burning plane plunged to the ground, its pilot,
thirty-one-year-old Flight Lieutenant David Lord, still at the
controls, Miller saw beyond the trees "only an oily column of smoke to
mark the resting place of a brave crew who died that we might have the
chance to live."

But Sergeant Miller was wrong. One member of the crew of the ill-fated
Dakota did survive. Flying Officer Henry Arthur King, the navigator on
that flight, remembers that just a few minutes before 4 P.m. as the
plane was approaching the drop zone, flak set the starboard engine
afire. Over the intercom Lord said, "Everyone O.k.? How far to the
drop zone, Harry?" King called back, "Three minutes' flying time."
The plane was listing heavily to the right and King saw that they were
losing altitude rapidly. Flames had begun to spread along the wing
toward the main fuel tank. "They need the stuff down there," he heard
Lord say. "We'll go in and bail out afterwards. Everyone get your
chutes on."

King spotted the drop zone and informed Lord. "O.k., Harry, I can see
it," the pilot said. "Go back and give them a hand with the

baskets." King made his way back to the open door. Flak had hit the
rollers used to move the heavy supply bundles, and the dispatcher,
Corporal Philip Nixon, and three soldiers from the Royal Army Service
Corps were already manhandling eight heavy panniers of ammunition to
the door. The men had taken off their parachutes in order to tug the
baskets forward. Together the five men had pushed out six baskets when
the red light, indicating that the plane was now off the drop zone,
came on. King went on the intercom. "Dave," he called to Lord, "we've
got two left." Lord put the plane in a tight left turn. "We'll come
round again," he answered. "Hang on."

King saw they were then at about 500 feet and Lord "was handling that
ship like a fighter plane. I was trying to help the R.a.s.c. boys get
their chutes back on. The green light flashed and we pushed out our
bundles. The next thing I remember is Lord shouting, "Bail out! Bail
out! For God's sake, bail out!" There was a tremendous explosion and
I found myself hurtling through the air. I don't remember pulling the
ripcord but I must have done it instinctively. I landed flat and hard
on my back. I remember looking at my watch and seeing it was only nine
minutes since we took the flak. My uniform was badly scorched and I
couldn't find my shoes."

Nearly an hour later, King stumbled across a company of the 10th
Battalion. Someone gave him tea and a bar of chocolate. "That's all
we've got," the trooper told him. King stared at him. "What do you
mean, that's all you've got? We just dropped supplies to you." The
soldier shook his head. "You dropped our tins of sardines all right,
but the Jerries got them. We got nothing." King was speechless. He
thought of Flight Lieutenant Lord, and the crew and men who had shed
their chutes in a desperate effort to get precious ammunition bundles
out to the anxious troops below. Of all these men, only King was
alive. And now he had just learned that the sacrifice of his crew had
been for nothing. * * Flight Lieutenant David Lord, holder of the
Distinguished Flying Cross, was posthumously awarded the Victoria
Cross. The bodies of the three R.a.f. officers and the four Army
dispatchers--Pilot Officer R. E. H. Medhurst, Flying Officer A.
Ballantyne, Corporal Nixon, Drivers James Ricketts, Leonard Sidney
Harper and Arthur Rowbotham-- were all identified and are buried in the
British Military Cemetery at Arnhem.

Planes crash-landed throughout the area, mainly around Wageningen and
Renkum. Some ended up on the southern side of the Rhine. Sergeant
Walter Simpson remembers hearing his pilot shout over the intercom, "My
God, we've been hit!" Looking out, Simpson saw that the port engine
was on fire. He heard the engines being throttled back and then the
plane went into a dive. The frightened Simpson remembers that the
plane "dragged its tail across the north bank of the river, lifted
slightly, then catapulted across the water and came down on the
southern side."

On impact Simpson was hurtled forward and thrown to one side of the
fuselage. The wireless operator, Sergeant Runsdale, crashed into him
and lay huddled across Simpson's body. The interior of the plane was a
shambles, fuel was burning, and Simpson could hear the crackling of
flames. As he tried to ease his legs from under the wireless operator,
Runsdale screamed and fainted. His back was broken. Simpson staggered
up and carried the sergeant out through the escape hatch. Four crew
members, dazed and in shock, were already there. Simpson went back for
the others still inside. He found the bombardier unconscious. "His
shoe had been blown off, part of his heel was missing and both arms
were broken," he recalls. Simpson picked up this man, too, and carried
him out. Although the plane was now burning fiercely, Simpson went
back a third time for the engineer, whose leg was broken. He, too, was
brought to safety.

In the village of Driel, young Cora Baltussen, her sister Reat and
their brother Albert saw Simpson's plane come down. The three
immediately set out for the site of the crash. "It was horrible," Cora
recalls. "There were eight men and some of them were terribly injured.
We dragged them away from the burning plane just as it exploded. I
knew that the Germans would be looking for the crew. I told the pilot,
Flight Officer Jeffrey Liggens, who was unharmed, that we'd have to
hide him out while we took the injured men to the small surgery in the
village.

We hid him and two others in a nearby brickworks and told them we'd
return at dark." That evening Cora assisted the lone physician in the
village, a woman, Dr. Sanderbobrorg, as she amputated the bombardier's
foot. The war had finally reached both Cora and little Driel.

In all, out of 100 bombers and 63 Dakotas, 97 were damaged and 13 were
shot down --and, in spite of the heroism of pilots and crews,
Urquhart's stricken division had not been bolstered. Of 390 tons of
stores and ammunition dropped, nearly all fell into German hands. Only
an estimated 21 tons was retrieved.

Worse problems were to engulf the Polish transport and artillery lift.
Before leaving England in the Polish lift, Sergeant Pilot Kenneth
Travis-Davison, copilot of a Horsa glider, was struck by the almost
complete absence of information relating to conditions at their
destination. Routes were laid out on maps, and the drop zones for the
Poles' artillery and transport were marked; but, says Travis-Davison,
"we were told that the situation was unknown." The only landing
instruction was that "gliders should land on the area marked by purple
smoke." In Travis-Davison's opinion, "the briefing was ludicrous."

Yet, despite the inadequacy of information, R.a.f. planes correctly
located the drop zone near Johannahoeve Farm and 31 out of 46 gliders
reached the zone. As they came in, the air erupted with fire. A
squadron of Messerschmitts hit many of the machines, riddling the thin
canvas-and-plywood hulls, puncturing the gas tanks of jeeps and setting
some afire. Antiaircraft bursts caught others. Those that made it to
the ground landed in the midst of a battlefield. Troopers of Hackett's
4th Brigade, struggling to disengage from an enemy that threatened to
overrun them, were unable to reach the high ground and the drop zone
beyond in time to protect the area. As the British and Germans fought
fiercely, the Poles landed directly in the middle of the cataclysmic
battle. In the terror and confusion the Poles were fired on from both
sides. Gliders, many already on fire, crash-landed on the field or
plowed into nearby trees. Polish artillerymen, caught in the crossfire
and unable to tell friend from foe,

fired back at both the Germans and British. Then, hastily unloading
the usable jeeps and artillery, the dazed men ran a gauntlet of fire as
they left the landing zone. Surprisingly, ground casualties were
light, but many of the men, bewildered and shocked, were taken
prisoner. Most of the jeeps and supplies were destroyed and of eight
desperately needed six-pounder antitank guns, only three came through
undamaged. General Stanislaw Sosabowski's fears were more than
justified. And the ordeal of the 1/ Polish Parachute Brigade was only
just beginning.

Some forty miles south along the highway, General Maxwell Taylor's 101/
troopers were now fighting hard to keep the corridor open. But the
German Fifteenth Army's fierce defense at Best was draining Taylor's
forces. More and more men were being caught up in the bitter
engagement that one division intelligence officer wryly termed "a minor
error in estimate." Pressure was building all along Taylor's 15-mile
sector, which the Screaming Eagles had newly named "Hell's Highway."
It was now obvious that the enemy's intent was to cut off Horrocks'
tank spearhead, using Best as the base.

The jammed columns of vehicles massing the highway were easy targets
for artillery fire. Bulldozers and tanks roamed constantly up and down
the road, pushing wreckage out of the convoys to keep the columns
rolling. Since Sunday, Best, the minor secondary objective, had grown
to such proportions that it threatened to overpower all other action
along Taylor's stretch of road. Now, the 101/ commander was determined
to crush the enemy at Best completely.

Early Tuesday afternoon, with the support of British tanks, Taylor
threw almost the entire 502nd Regiment against Von Zangen's men at
Best. The mammoth attack caught the enemy by surprise. Bolstered by
the recently arrived 327th Glider Infantry Regiment and by British
armor on the highway, the 2nd and 3rd battalions relentlessly swept the
forested areas east of Best.

Caught in a giant ring and forced back toward the Wilhelmina Canal, the
Germans suddenly broke. With the commitment of fresh forces, the
battle that had continued without letup for close to forty-six hours
was suddenly over in two. Taylor's men had achieved the first major
victory of Market-Garden. More than three hundred of the enemy were
killed and over a thousand captured, along with fifteen 88 mm.
artillery pieces. "By late afternoon," reads the official history, "as
hundreds of Germans gave up, the word went out to send all Military
Police available." Lieutenant Edward Wierzbowski, the platoon leader
who had come closest to seizing the Best bridge before it was blown,
brought in his own prisoners after having first been captured himself.
Out of grenades and ammunition, with his casualties all about him--only
three men of his valiant platoon had not been wounded --Wierzbowski had
finally surrendered. Now, dead tired and begrimed, Wierzbowski and his
men, including some of the wounded, disarmed the doctors and orderlies
in the German field hospital to which the men had been taken and
marched back to Division, bringing their prisoners with them.

Successful as the engagement had been, General Taylor's difficulties
were far from over. Even as the battle at Best ended, German armor
struck out for the newly installed bridge at Son in yet another attempt
to sever the corridor. Taylor himself, leading his headquarters
troops-- his only available reinforcements--rushed to the scene. With
bazooka fire and a single antitank gun, a German Panther tank was
knocked out almost as it reached the bridge. Similarly, several other
tanks were quickly dispatched. The German attack collapsed, and
traffic continued to move. But the vigilance of the Screaming Eagles
could not be relaxed. "Our situation," Taylor later noted, "reminded
me of the early American West, where small garrisons had to contend
with sudden Indian attacks at any point along great stretches of vital
railroad."

The Germans' hard, fast, hit-and-run tactics were taking their toll.
Almost 300 men of the 101/ had been killed or wounded or were missing
in ground actions. Men in slit trenches holding positions on either
side of the highway or in the fields around

Best were in constant danger of being overrun from the flanks, and each
night brought its own particular fear. In darkness, with the Germans
infiltrating the 101/'s perimeter, no one knew whether the man in the
next foxhole would be alive by the following morning. In the confusion
and surprise of these sharp enemy actions men suddenly disappeared, and
when the fire fights were over their friends searched for them among
the dead and wounded on the battle ground and at aid stations and field
hospitals.

As the Best battle ended and the long lines of prisoners were being
herded back to Division, thirty-one-year-old Staff Sergeant Charles
Dohun set out to find his officer, Captain LeGrand Johnson. Back in
England prior to the jump, Dohun had been almost "numb with worry."
The twenty-two-year-old Johnson had felt much the same. He was
"resigned to never coming back." The morning of the nineteenth Johnson
had thrown his company into an attack near Best. "It was that or be
slaughtered," he recalls. In the fierce battle, which Johnson
remembers as "the worst I have ever seen or heard," he was shot in the
left shoulder. With his company reduced from 180 to 38 and surrounded
in a field of burning haystacks, Johnson held off the Germans until
relieving companies, driving back the enemy, could reach and evacuate
the survivors. As Johnson was being helped back to an aid station he
was shot once again, this time through the head. At the battalion aid
station his body was placed among other fatally wounded men in what the
medics called the "dead pile." There, after a long search, Sergeant
Dohun found him. Kneeling down, Dohun was convinced there was a
flicker of life.

Picking up the inert officer, Dohun laid Johnson and four other
casualties from his company in a jeep and set out for the field
hospital at Son. Cut off by Germans, Dohun drove the jeep into the
woods and hid. When the German patrol moved on, he set out again.
Arriving at the hospital, he found long lines of casualties waiting for
treatment. Dohun, certain that Johnson might die at any minute, passed
down the lines of wounded until he came to a surgeon who was checking
the casualties to determine who was in

need of immediate aid. "Major," Dohun told the doctor, "my captain
needs attention right away." The major shook his head. "I'm sorry,
sergeant," he told Dohun. "We'll get to him. He'll have to wait his
turn." Dohun tried again. "Major, he'll die if you don't look at him
quick." The doctor was firm. "We've got a lot of injured men here,"
he said. "Your captain will be attended to as soon as we can get to
him." Dohun pulled out his .45 and cocked the trigger. "It's not soon
enough," he said calmly. "Major, I'll kill you right where you stand
if you don't look at him right now." Astonished, the surgeon stared at
Dohun. "Bring him in," he said.

In the operating theater Dohun stood by, his .45 in hand as the doctor
and a medical team worked on Johnson. As the sergeant watched, Johnson
was given a blood transfusion, his wounds cleaned and a bullet was
removed from his skull and another from his left shoulder. When the
operation was completed and Johnson was bandaged, Dohun moved.
Stepping up to the doctor, he handed over his .45. "O.k.," he said,
"thanks. Now you can turn me in."

Dohun was sent back to the 2nd Battalion of the 502nd. There, he was
brought before the commanding officer. Dohun snapped to attention. He
was asked if he was aware of exactly what he had done and that his
action constituted a court-martial offense. Dohun replied, "Yes, sir,
I do." Pacing up and down, the commander suddenly stopped.
"Sergeant," he said, "I'm placing you under arrest"--he paused and
looked at his watch-- "for exactly one minute." The two men waited in
silence. Then the officer looked at Dohun. "Dismissed," he said.
"Now get back to your unit." Dohun saluted smartly. "Yes, sir," he
said, and left. * * I am indebted to Mrs. Johnson for this story.
She first learned of it from the adjutant of the 502nd, Captain Hugh
Roberts. Although Captain Roberts did not mention the commanding
officer's name, I must assume that it was Lieutenant Colonel Steve
Chappuis of the 2nd Battalion. Captain Johnson remembers only that he
"woke up in England six weeks later--blind, deaf, dumb, forty pounds
lighter andwitha big plate in my head." Except for partial blindness,
he recovered. Sergeant Dohun, in his correspondence and interview for
this book, made little mention of the role he played in saving Captain
Johnson's life. But he acknowledges that it happened. "I don't know
to this day," he wrote, "if I would have shot that medic or not."

Now, in General Gavin's sector of the corridor, as Horrocks' tanks
rolled forward toward Nijmegen, the quick capture of the city's
crossings assumed critical importance. On the seventeenth the Germans
had had only a few soldiers guarding the approaches to the Waal river
bridge. By afternoon of the nineteenth Gavin estimated that he was
opposed by more than five hundred SS Grenadiers, well-positioned and
supported by artillery and armor. The main body of the Guards Armored
Division was still en route to the city. Only the spearhead of the
British column--elements of the 1/ Battalion of the Grenadier Guards
under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Edward H. Goulburn--was
available for an attack and Gavin's 82nd troopers in their ten-mile
stretch of corridor were widely dispersed by their efforts to fight off
a constantly encroaching enemy. Since Gavin's Glider Infantry
Regiment, based in the fogbound Midlands of England, had been unable to
take off, he could afford to release only one battalion for a combined
attack with the British spearhead tanks. Gavin chose the 2nd Battalion
of the 505th under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ben Vandervoort.
There was a chance that the attack, based on speed and surprise, might
succeed. If anyone could help effect it, Gavin believed it was the
reserved, soft-spoken Vandervoort. * Still, the operation carried
heavy risks. Gavin thought the British appeared to underestimate the
German strength, as indeed they did. The Grenadier Guards'
after-action report noted that "It was thought that a display in the
shape of tanks would probably cause the enemy to withdraw." * In
Normandy, Vandervoort had fought for forty days with a broken ankle.
See The Longest Day, pp. 143, 181.

At 3:30 P.m. the combined attack began. The force quickly penetrated
the center of the city without encountering serious opposition. There,
approximately forty British tanks and armored vehicles split into two
columns, with American troops riding on the tanks and following behind
them. On top of lead tanks and in

reconnaissance cars were twelve specially chosen Dutch underground
scouts guiding the way--among them a twenty-two-year-old university
student named Jan van Hoof, whose later actions would become a subject
of sharp dispute. "I was reluctant to use him," recalls the 82nd's
Dutch liaison officer, Captain Arie D. Bestebreurtje. "He seemed
highly excited, but another underground member vouched for his record.
He went in with a British scout car and that was the last I ever saw of
him." As the force divided, one column headed for the railroad bridge
and the second, with Goulburn and Vandervoort, approached the main
highway crossing over the Waal.

At both objectives the Germans were waiting in strength. Staff
Sergeant Paul Nunan remembers that as his platoon approached an
underpass near the railroad bridge, "we began receiving sniper fire.
With a thousand places for snipers to hide, it was hard to tell where
fire was coming from." Men dived for cover and slowly began to pull
back. British armor fared no better. As tanks began to roll toward
the bridge, 88's, firing down the street at almost point-blank range,
knocked them out. A wide street, the Kraijenhoff Laan, led to a
triangular park west of the crossing. There, in buildings facing the
park on three sides, the paratroopers regrouped for another attack.
But again the Germans held them off. Snipers on roofs and machine guns
firing from a railroad overpass kept the men pinned down.

Some troopers remember Lieutenant Russ Parker, a cigar clenched in his
teeth, moving into the open and spraying the rooftops to keep snipers'
heads down. A call went out for tanks, and Nunan remembers that "at
that instant the entire park seemed filled with tracer slugs coming
from a fast-firing automatic weapon sited to our left across the
street." Nunan turned to Herbert Buffalo Boy, a Sioux Indian and a
veteran 82nd trooper. "I think they're sending a German tank," he
said. Buffalo Boy grinned. "Well, if they've got infantry with them,
it could get to be a very tough day," he told Nunan. The German tank
did not materialize, but a 20 mm. antiaircraft gun opened up. With
grenades, machine guns and bazookas, the troopers fought on

until word was passed for forward platoons to pull back and consolidate
for the night. As men moved out, the Germans set buildings along the
river's edge on fire, making it impossible for Vandervoort's men to
infiltrate, overrun artillery positions and clear out pockets of
resistance. The railroad bridge attack had ground to a halt.

Under cover of heavy American artillery fire, the second column had
made for Huner Park, the ornamental gardens leading to the approaches
of the highway bridge. Here, in a traffic circle, all roads leading to
the bridge converged and an ancient ruin with a sixteen-sided
chapel--the Valkhof--once the palace of Charlemagne and later rebuilt
by Barbarossa, commanded the area. In this citadel the enemy was
concentrated. It almost seemed to Colonel Goulburn that "the Boche had
some sort of an idea of what we were trying to do." As indeed they
had.

Captain Karl Heinz Euling's battalion of SS Panzer Grenadiers was one
of the first units to cross the Rhine at Pannerden. Acting on General
Harmel's orders to protect the bridge at all costs, Euling had ringed
the Huner Park area with self-propelled guns and had positioned men in
the chapel of the old ruin. As British tanks rattled around the
corners of the streets leading to the park, they came under Euling's
guns. Meeting a punishing artillery barrage, the tanks pulled back.
Colonel Vandervoort immediately took to the street, and getting a
mortar crew into action with covering fire, he moved one company
forward. As the company's lead platoon, under First Lieutenant James
J. Coyle, sprinted for a row of attached houses facing the park, they
came under small-arms and mortar fire. Lieutenant William J. Meddaugh,
second in command, saw that this was "observed fire. The guns and
snipers were being directed by radio. British tanks covered our front
as Lieutenant Coyle moved into a block of buildings overlooking the
entire enemy position. Other platoons were stopped, unable to move,
and the situation looked rotten."

Covered by British smoke bombs Meddaugh succeeded in bringing the rest
of the company forward, and the commander,

Lieutenant J. J. Smith, consolidated his men in houses around Coyle.
As Meddaugh recalls, "Coyle's platoon now had a perfect view of the
enemy, but as we started to move tanks up, some high-velocity guns
opened up that had not done any firing as yet. Two tanks were knocked
out, and the others retired." As Coyle's men replied with machine
guns, they immediately drew antitank gun fire from across the streets.
When darkness closed in, Euling's SS men attempted to infiltrate the
American positions. One group got to within a few feet of Coyle's
platoon before they were spotted and a fierce fire fight broke out.
Coyle's men suffered casualties, and three of the Germans were killed
before the attack was driven back. Later, Euling sent medics to pick
up his wounded, and Coyle's paratroopers waited until the injured
Germans were evacuated before resuming the fight. In the middle of the
action, Private First Class John Keller heard a low pounding noise.
Going to a window, he was amazed to see a Dutchman on a stepladder
calmly replacing the shingles on the house next door as though nothing
was happening.

In late evening, with small-arms fire continuing, any further attempt
to advance was postponed until daylight. The Anglo-American assault
had been abruptly stopped barely 400 yards from the Waal river
bridge--the last water obstacle on the road to Arnhem.

To the Allied commanders it was now clear that the Germans were in
complete control of the bridges. Browning, worried that the crossings
might be destroyed at any moment, called another conference late on the
nineteenth. A way must be found to cross the 400-yard-wide Waal river.
General Gavin had devised a plan which he had mentioned to Browning at
the time of the link-up. Then the Corps commander had turned down the
scheme. At this second conference Gavin proposed it again. "There's
only one way to take this bridge," he told the assembled officers.
"We've got to get it simultaneously--from both ends." Gavin urged that
"any boats in Horrocks' engineering columns should be rushed forward
immediately, because we're going to need them." The

British looked at him in bewilderment. What the 82nd commander had in
mind was an assault crossing of the river--by paratroops.

Gavin went on to explain. In nearly three days of fighting, his
casualties were high-- upwards of 200 dead and nearly 700 injured.
Several hundred more men were cut off or scattered and were listed as
missing. His losses, Gavin reasoned, would grow progressively worse if
blunt head-on attacks continued. What was needed was a means of
capturing the bridge quickly and cheaply. Gavin's plan was to throw a
force in boats across the river a mile downstream while the attack
continued for possession of the southern approaches. Under a barrage
of tank fire the troopers were to storm the enemy defenses on the
northern side before the Germans fully realized what was happening.

Yet total surprise was out of the question. The river was too wide to
enable boatloads of men to escape detection, and the bank on the far
side was so exposed that troopers, once across the river, would have to
negotiate 200 yards of flat ground. Beyond was an embankment from
which German gunners could fire down upon the invading paratroopers.
That defense position would have to be overrun too. Although heavy
casualties could be expected initially, in Gavin's opinion they would
still be less than if the assault were continued against the southern
approaches alone. "The attempt has to be made," he told Browning, "if
Market-Garden is to succeed."

Colonel George S. Chatterton, commander of the British Glider Pilot
Regiment, remembers that, besides Browning and Horrocks, commanders of
the Irish, Scots, and Grenadier Guards were present at the conference.
So was cigar-chewing Colonel Reuben Tucker, commander of the 82nd's
504th Regiment, whose men Gavin had picked to make the river assault if
his plan won approval. Although intent on Gavin's words, Chatterton
could not help noting the differences in the men assembled. "One
brigadier wore suede shoes and sat on a shooting stick," he recalls.
"Three Guards' commanders had on rather worn corduroy trousers, chukka
boots and old school scarves." Chatterton thought "they

seemed relaxed, as though they were discussing an exercise, and I
couldn't help contrast them to the Americans present, especially
Colonel Tucker, who was wearing a helmet that almost covered his face.
His pistol was in a holster under his left arm, and he had a knife
strapped to his thigh." To Chatterton's great amusement, "Tucker
occasionally removed his cigar long enough to spit and every time he
did faint looks of surprise flickered over the faces of the Guards'
officers."

But the daring of Gavin's plan provided the real surprise. "I knew it
sounded outlandish," Gavin recalls, "but speed was essential. There
was no time even for a reconnaissance. As I continued to talk, Tucker
was the only man in the room who seemed unfazed. He had made the
landing at Anzio and knew what to expect. To him the crossing was like
the kind of exercise the 504th had practiced at Fort Bragg." Still,
for paratroopers, it was unorthodox and Browning's chief of staff,
Brigadier Gordon Walch, recalls that the Corps commander was "by now
filled with admiration at the daring of the idea." This time Browning
gave his approval.

The immediate problem was to find boats. Checking with his engineers,
Horrocks learned they carried some twenty-eight small canvas and
plywood craft. These would be rushed to Nijmegen during the night. If
the planning could be completed in time, Gavin's miniature
Normandy-like amphibious assault of the Waal would take place at 1 P.m.
the next day, on the twentieth. Never before had paratroopers
attempted such a combat operation. But Gavin's plan seemed to offer
the best hope of grabbing the Nijmegen bridge intact; and then, as
everyone still believed, another quick dash up the corridor would unite
them with the men at Arnhem.

In the grassy expanse of the Eusebius Buiten Singel, General Heinz
Harmel personally directed the opening of the bombardment against
Frost's men at the bridge. His attempt to persuade

Frost to surrender had failed. Now, to the assembled tank and
artillery commanders his instructions were specific: they were to level
every building held by the paratroopers. "Since the British won't come
out of their holes, we'll blast them out," Harmel said. He told
gunners to "aim right under the gables and shoot meter by meter, floor
by floor, until each house collapses." Harmel was determined that the
siege would end, and since everything else had failed this was the only
course. "By the time we're finished," Harmel added, "there'll be
nothing left but a pile of bricks." Lying flat on the ground between
two artillery pieces, Harmel trained his binoculars on the British
strongholds and directed the fire. As the opening salvos zeroed in he
stood up, satisfied, and handed over to his officers. "I would have
liked to stay," he recalls. "It was a new experience in fighting for
me. But with the Anglo-Americans attacking the bridges at Nijmegen I
had to rush down there." As Harmel left, his gunners, with methodical,
scythelike precision, began the job of reducing Frost's remaining
positions to rubble.

Of the eighteen buildings that the 2nd Battalion had initially
occupied, Frost's men now held only about ten. While tanks hit
positions from the east and west, artillery slammed shells into those
facing north. The barrage was merciless. "It was the best, most
effective fire I have ever seen," remembers SS Grenadier Private Horst
Weber. "Starting from the rooftops, buildings collapsed like doll
houses. I did not see how anyone could live through this inferno. I
felt truly sorry for the British."

Weber watched three Tiger tanks rumble slowly down the Groote Markt,
and while machine guns sprayed every window in a block of buildings
opposite the northern approaches to the bridge, the tanks "pumped shell
after shell into each house, one after the other." He remembers a
corner building where "the roof fell in, the two top stories began to
crumble and then, like the skin peeling off a skeleton, the whole front
wall fell into the street revealing each floor on which the British
were scrambling like mad." Dust and debris, Weber remembers, "soon
made it impos-

sible to see anything more. The din was awful but even so, above it
all we could hear the wounded screaming."

In relays, tanks smashed houses along the Rhine waterfront and under
the bridge itself. Often, as the British darted out, tanks rammed the
ruins like bulldozers, completely leveling the sites. At Captain
Mackay's headquarters under the ramp in the nearly destroyed
schoolhouse, Lieutenant Peter Stainforth estimated that "high-explosive
shells came through the southern face of the building at the rate of
one every ten seconds." It became "rather hot," he recalls, "and
everyone had some sort of wound or other." Yet the troopers
obstinately hung on, evacuating each room in its turn "as ceilings
collapsed, cracks appeared in the walls, and rooms became untenable."
In the rubble, making every shot count, the Red Devils, Stainforth
recalls proudly, "survived like moles. Jerry just couldn't dig us
out." But elsewhere men were finding their positions almost
unendurable. "The Germans had decided to shell us out of existence,"
Private James W. Sims explains. "It seemed impossible for the shelling
and mortaring to get any heavier, but it did. Burst after burst, shell
after shell rained down, the separate explosions merging into one
continuous rolling detonation." With each salvo Sims repeated a
desperate litany, "Hold on! Hold on! It can't last much longer." As
he crouched alone in his slit trench the thought struck Sims that he
was "lying in a freshly dug grave just waiting to be buried alive." He
remembers thinking that "unless XXX Corps hurries, we have had it."

Colonel Frost realized that disaster had finally overtaken the 2nd
Battalion. The relieving battalions had not broken through, and Frost
was sure they were no longer able to come to his aid. The Polish drop
had failed to materialize. Ammunition was all but gone. Casualties
were now so high that every available cellar was full, and the men had
been fighting without letup for over fifty hours. Frost knew they
could not endure this punishment much longer. All about his defensive
perimeter, houses were in flames, buildings had collapsed, and
positions were being over-

run. He did not know how much longer he could hold out. His beloved
2nd Battalion was being buried in the ruins of the buildings around
him. Yet Frost was not ready to oblige his enemy. Beyond hope, he was
determined to deny the Germans the Arnhem bridge to the last.

He was not alone in his emotions. Their ordeal seemed to affect his
men much as it did Frost. Troopers shared their ammunition and took
what little they could find from their wounded, preparing for the doom
that was engulfing them. There was little evidence of fear. In their
exhaustion, hunger and pain, the men seemed to develop a sense of humor
about themselves and their situation which grew even as their sacrifice
became increasingly apparent.

Father Egan remembers meeting Frost coming out of a toilet. "The
Colonel's face--tired, grimy, and wearing a stubble of beard--lit up
with a smile," Egan recalls. ""Father," he told me, "the window is
shattered, there's a hole in the wall, and the roof's gone. But it has
a chain and it works.""

Later, Egan was trying to make his way across one street to visit
wounded in the cellars. The area was being heavily mortared and the
chaplain was taking cover wherever he could. "Outside, strolling
unconcernedly up the street was Major Digby Tatham-Warter, whose
company had taken the bridge initially," he recalls. "The major saw me
cowering down and walked over. In his hand was an umbrella." As Egan
recalls, Tatham-Warter "opened the umbrella and held it over my head.
With mortar shells raining down everywhere, he said, "Come along,
Padre."" When Egan showed reluctance, Tatham-Warter reassured him.
"Don't worry," he said, "I've got an umbrella." Lieutenant Patrick
Barnett encountered the redoubtable major soon afterward. Barnett was
sprinting across the street to a new defense area Frost had ordered him
to hold. Tatham-Warter, returning from escorting Father Egan, was out
visiting his men in the shrinking perimeter defenses and holding the
umbrella over his head. Barnett was so surprised that he stopped in
his tracks. "That thing won't do you much good," he told the major.
Tatham-Warter looked at him in

mock surprise. "Oh, my goodness, Pat," he said. "What if it rains?"

During the afternoon, as the bombardment continued, Major Freddie Gough
saw Tatham-Warter leading his company, umbrella in hand. Tanks were
thundering down the streets firing at everything. "I almost fainted
when I saw those huge Mark IV'S firing at us at almost point-blank
range," recalls Gough. Then the tension was suddenly relieved.
"There, out in the street leading his men in a bayonet charge against
some Germans who had managed to infiltrate, was Tatham-Warter," Gough
recalls. "He had found an old bowler someplace and he was rushing
along, twirling that battered umbrella, looking for all the world like
Charlie Chaplin."

There were other moments of humor equally memorable. As the afternoon
wore on, battalion headquarters was heavily bombarded and caught fire.
Father Egan went down to the cellar to see the wounded. "Well, Padre,"
said Sergeant Jack Spratt, who was regarded as the battalion comic,
"they're throwing everything at us but the kitchen stove." He had
barely said the words when the building suffered another direct hit.
"The ceiling fell in, showering us with dirt and plaster. When we
picked ourselves up, there right in front of us was a kitchen stove."
Spratt looked at it and shook his head. "I knew the bastards were
close," he said, "but I didn't believe they could hear us talking."

Toward evening it began to rain, and the German attack seemed to
intensify. Captain Mackay, on the opposite side of the bridge,
contacted Frost. "I told the Colonel I could not hold out another
night if the attack continued on the same scale," Mackay wrote. "He
said he could not help me, but I was to hold on at all costs."

Mackay could see the Germans were slowly compressing Frost's force. He
saw British troopers scurrying from burning houses along the riverbank
toward a couple almost opposite him, which were still standing. "They
were beginning to hem us in," he noted, "and it was obvious that if we
didn't get help soon, they'd winkle us out. I went up to the attic and
tuned into the 6 o'clock BBC news. To my utter amazement the
newscaster said that British armor had reached the airborne troops." *
* Mackay thought the report referred to Arnhem; in fact, it related to
the link-up of Horrocks' tanks with the 82nd Airborne in Nijmegen.

Almost immediately Mackay heard a cry from the floor below, "Tiger
tanks are heading for the bridge." (it was exactly 7 P.m. German time;
6 P.m. British time.) Two of the huge 60-ton tanks were heading in from
the north. On his side of the bridge Frost saw them, too. "They
looked incredibly sinister in the half light," he noted. "Like some
prehistoric monsters, as their great guns swung from side to side
breathing flame. Their shells burst through the walls. The dust and
slowly settling debris following their explosions filled the passages
and rooms."

One complete side of Mackay's building was hit. "Some of the shells
must have been armor-piercing," Lieutenant Peter Stainforth says,
"because they went through the school from end to end, knocking a
four-foot hole in every room." Ceilings came down, walls cracked and
"the whole structure rocked." Staring at the two tanks on the ramp,
Mackay thought the end had come. "A couple more rounds like that and
we'll be finished," he said. Still, with the stubborn and fearless
resistance that the fighters at the bridge had shown since their
arrival, Mackay thought that he might "be able to take a party out and
blow them up. But just then the two tanks reversed and pulled back.
We were still alive."

At Frost's headquarters, Father Egan had been hit. Caught on a
stairway when shells began coming in, he fell two flights to the first
floor. When he recovered consciousness, the priest was alone except
for one man. Crawling to him, Egan saw that the trooper was near
death. At that moment another barrage hit the building and Egan again
lost consciousness. He awoke to find that the room and his clothes
were on fire. Desperately he rolled along the floor, beating the
flames out with his hands. The injured man he had seen earlier was
dead. Now Egan could not use his legs. Slowly, in excruciating pain,
he hauled himself toward a window. Someone called his name, and the
intelligence officer, Lieutenant Bucky Buchanan, helped him through the
window and dropped

him into the arms of Sergeant Jack Spratt. In the cellar, where Dr.
James Logan was at work, the priest was put on the floor with other
wounded. His right leg was broken and his back and hands were peppered
with shrapnel splinters. "I was pretty well out of it," Egan recalls.
"I couldn't do much now but lie there on my stomach." Nearby, slightly
wounded, was the incredible Tatham-Warter, still trying to keep men's
spirits up, and still hanging on to his umbrella.

Occasionally there was a pause in the terrible pounding, and Captain
Mackay believed the Germans were stocking up with more ammunition. As
darkness set in during one of these intervals, Mackay issued benzedrine
tablets to his tired force, two pills per man. The effect on the
exhausted, weary men was unexpected and acute. Some troopers became
irritable and argumentative. Others suffered double vision and for a
time could not aim straight. Among the shocked and wounded, men became
euphoric and some began to hallucinate. Corporal Arthur Hendy
remembers being grabbed by one trooper, who pulled him to a window.
"Look," he commanded Hendy in a whisper. "It's the Second Army. On
the far bank. Look. Do you see them?" Sadly, Hendy shook his head.
The man became enraged. "They're right over there," he shouted, "plain
as anything."

Mackay wondered if his small force would see out the night. Fatigue
and wounds were taking their toll. "I was thinking clearly," Mackay
remembers, "but we had had nothing to eat and no sleep. We were
limited to one cup of water daily, and everyone was wounded." With his
ammunition nearly gone, Mackay set his men to making homemade bombs
from the small stock of explosives still remaining. He intended to be
ready when the German tanks returned. Taking a head count, Mackay now
reported to Frost that he had only thirteen men left capable of
fighting.

From his position on the far side of the bridge, as the night of
Tuesday, September 19, closed in, Frost saw that the entire city
appeared to be burning. The spires of two great churches were flaming
fiercely and as Frost watched, "the cross which hung

between two lovely towers was silhouetted against the clouds rising far
into the sky." He noted that "the crackle of burning wood and the
strange echoes of falling buildings seemed unearthly." Upstairs,
Signalman Stanley Copley, sitting at his radio set, had abandoned
sending in Morse code. Now he was broadcasting in the clear.
Continually he kept repeating, "This is the 1/ Para Brigade calling
Second Army. ... Come in Second Army. ... Come in Second Army."

At his headquarters in Oosterbeek's Hartenstein Hotel, General Urquhart
tried desperately to save what remained of his division. Frost was cut
off. Every attempt to reach him at the bridge had been mercilessly
beaten back. German reinforcements were pouring in. From the west,
north and east, Bittrich's forces were steadily chopping the gallant 1/
British Airborne to pieces. Cold, wet, worn out, but still
uncomplaining, the Red Devils were trying to hold out--fighting off
tanks with rifles and Sten guns. The situation was heartbreaking for
Urquhart. Only quick action could save his heroic men. By Wednesday
morning, September 20, Urquhart had developed a plan to salvage the
remnants of his command and perhaps turn the tide in his favor.

September 19--"a dark and fateful day," in Urquhart's words--had been
the turning point. The cohesion and drive that he had hoped to instill
had come too late. Everything had failed: the Polish forces had not
arrived; the cargo drops had been disastrous; and battalions had been
devastated in their attempts to reach Frost. The division was being
pushed closer and closer to destruction. The tally of Urquhart's
remaining men told a frightful story. All through the night of the
nineteenth, battalion units still in contact with division headquarters
reported their strength. Inconclusive and inaccurate as the figures
were, they presented a grim accounting: Urquhart's division was on the
verge of disappearing.

Of Lathbury's 1/ Parachute Brigade, only Frost's force was

fighting as a coordinated unit, but Urquhart had no idea how many men
were left in the 2nd Battalion. Fitch's 3rd Battalion listed some 50
men, and its commander was dead. Dobie's 1/ totaled 116, and Dobie had
been wounded and captured. The 11th Battalion's strength was down to
150, the 2nd South Staffordshires to 100. The commanders of both
units, Lea and McCardie, were wounded. In Hackett's 10th Battalion
there were now 250 men, and his 156th reported 270. Although
Urquhart's total division strength was more--the figures did not
include other units such as a battalion of the Border Regiment, the 7th
KOSB'S engineers, reconnaissance and service troops, glider pilots and
others--his attack battalions had almost ceased to exist. The men of
these proud units were now dispersed in small groups, dazed, shocked
and often leaderless.

The fighting had been so bloody and so terrible that even
battle-hardened veterans had broken. Urquhart and his chief of staff
had sensed an atmosphere of panic seeping through headquarters as small
groups of stragglers ran across the lawn yelling, "The Germans are
coming." Often, they were young soldiers, "whose self-control had
momentarily deserted them," Urquhart later wrote. "Mackenzie and I had
to intervene physically." But others fought on against formidable
odds. Captain L. E. Queripel, wounded in the face and arms, led an
attack on a German twin machine-gun nest and killed the crews. As
other Germans, throwing grenades, began to close in on Queripel and his
party, Queripel hurled the "potato mashers" back. Ordering his men to
leave him, the officer covered their retreat, throwing grenades until
he was killed. [Queripel was posthumously awarded the Victoria
Cross.]

Now, what remained of Urquhart's shattered and bloodied division was
being squeezed and driven back upon itself. All roads seemed to end in
the Oosterbeek area, with the main body of troops centered around the
Hartenstein in a few square miles running between Heveadorp and
Wolfheze on the west, and from Oosterbeek to Johannahoeve Farm on the
east. Within that rough corridor, ending on the Rhine at Heveadorp,
Urquhart planned to

make a stand. By pulling in his troops, he hoped to husband his
strength and hang on until Horrocks' armor reached him.

All through the night of the nineteenth orders went out for troops to
pull back into the Oosterbeek perimeter, and in the early hours of the
twentieth, Hackett was told to abandon his planned attack toward the
Arnhem bridge with his 10th and 156th battalions and disengage them
too. "It was a terrible decision to make," Urquhart said later. "It
meant abandoning the 2nd Battalion at the bridge, but I knew I had no
more chance of reaching them than I had of getting to Berlin." In his
view, the only hope "was to consolidate, form a defensive box and try
to hold on to a small bridgehead north of the river so that XXX Corps
could cross to us."

The discovery of the ferry operating between Heveadorp and Driel had
been an important factor in Urquhart's decision. It was vital to his
plan for survival; for on it, theoretically, help could arrive from the
southern bank. Additionally, at the ferry's landing stages on either
bank, there were ramps that would help the engineers to throw a Bailey
bridge across the Rhine. Admittedly the odds were great. But if the
Nijmegen bridge could be taken swiftly and if Horrocks moved fast and
if Urquhart's men could hold out long enough in their perimeter for
engineers to span the river--a great many ifs--there was still a chance
that Montgomery might get his bridgehead across the Rhine and drive for
the Ruhr, even though Frost might be overrun at Arnhem.

All through the nineteenth, messages had been sent from Urquhart's
headquarters requesting a new drop zone for the Poles. Communications,
though still erratic, were slightly improved. Lieutenant Neville Hay
of the Phantom net was passing some messages to British Second Army
headquarters, who in turn relayed them to Browning. At 3 A.m. on the
twentieth, Urquhart received a message from Corps asking for the
General's suggestions regarding the Poles' drop zone. As Urquhart saw
it, only one possible area remained. In view of his new plan he
requested the 1,500-man brigade be landed near the southern terminal of
the ferry in the vicinity of the little village of Driel.

Abandoning Frost and his men was the most bitter part of the plan. At
8 A.m. on Wednesday, Urquhart had an opportunity to explain the
position to Frost and Gough at the bridge. Using the Munford-Thompson
radio link, Gough called division headquarters and got through to
Urquhart. It was the first contact Gough had had with the General
since the seventeenth, when he had been ordered back to Division only
to discover that Urquhart was somewhere along the line of march. "My
goodness," Urquhart said, "I thought you were dead." Gough sketched in
the situation at the bridge. "Morale is still high," he recalls
saying, "but we're short of everything. Despite that, we'll continue
to hold out." Then, as Urquhart remembers, "Gough asked if they could
expect reinforcements."

Answering was not easy. "I told him," Urquhart recalls, "that I was
not certain if it was a case of me coming for them or they coming for
us. I'm afraid you can only hope for relief from the south." Frost
then came on the line. "It was very cheering to hear the General,"
Frost wrote, "but he could not tell me anything really encouraging.
... they were obviously having great difficulties themselves."
Urquhart requested that his "personal congratulations on a fine effort
be passed on to everyone concerned and I wished them the best of luck."
There was nothing more to be said.

Twenty minutes later, Urquhart received a message from Lieutenant
Neville Hay's Phantom net. It read:

200820 (from 2nd Army). Attack at Nijmegen held up by strongpoint
south of town. 5 Guards Brigade halfway in town. Bridge intact but
held by enemy. Intention attack at 1300 hours today.

Urquhart immediately told his staff to inform all units. It was the
first good news he had had this day.

Tragically, Urquhart had an outstanding force at his disposal whose
contributions, had they been accepted, might well have altered the grim
situation of the British 1/ Airborne Division.

The Dutch resistance ranked among the most dedicated and disciplined
underground units in all of occupied Europe. In the 101/ and 82nd
sectors Dutchmen were fighting alongside the American paratroopers.
One of the first orders Generals Taylor and Gavin had given on landing
was that arms and explosives be issued to the underground groups. But
in Arnhem the British virtually ignored the presence of these spirited,
brave civilians. Armed and poised to give immediate help to Frost at
the bridge, the Arnhem groups were largely unheeded, and their
assistance was politely rejected. By a strange series of events only
one man had held the power to coordinate and weld the resistance into
the British assault, and he was dead. Lieutenant Colonel Hilary
Barlow, the officer Urquhart had sent to coordinate the faltering
attacks of the battalions in the western suburbs, was killed before he
could put his own mission into full effect.

In the original plan, Barlow was to have assumed the role of Arnhem's
town major and military-government chief once the battle ended. His
assistant and the Dutch representative for the Gelderland province had
also been named. He was Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters of the
Dutch Navy. Prior to Market-Garden, an Anglo-Dutch intelligence
committee had given Barlow top-secret lists of Dutch underground
personnel who were known to be completely trustworthy. "From these
lists," recalls Wolters, "Barlow and I were to screen the groups and
use them in their various capabilities: intelligence, sabotage, combat
and the like. Barlow was the only other man who knew what our mission
really was. When he disappeared, the plan collapsed." At division
headquarters, Wolters was thought to be either a civil-affairs or an
intelligence officer. When he produced the secret lists and made
recommendations, he was looked on with suspicion. "Barlow trusted me
completely," Wolters says. "I regret to say that others at
headquarters did not."

With Barlow's death, Wolters' hands were tied. "The British wondered
why a Dutch Navy type should be with them at all," he remembers.
Gradually he won limited acceptance and although some members of the
resistance were put to work, they were too few and their help was too
late. "We hadn't time any longer to check everybody out to the
satisfaction of headquarters," Wolters says, "and the attitude there
was simply: "Who can we trust?"'" The opportunity to effectively
organize and collate the underground forces in the Arnhem area had been
lost. * * The British had long been wary of the Dutch underground. In
1942, Major Herman Giskes, Nazi spy chief in Holland, succeeded in
infiltrating Dutch intelligence networks. Agents sent from England
were captured and forced to work for him. For twenty months, in
perhaps the most spectacular counterintelligence operation of World War
II, nearly every agent parachuted into Holland was intercepted by the
Germans. As a security check, monitors in England were instructed to
listen for deliberate errors in Morse code radio transmissions. Yet
messages from these "double agents" were accepted without question by
British intelligence. It was not until two agents escaped that Giskes'
Operation North Pole came to an end. Having hoodwinked the Allies for
so long, Giskes could not resist boasting of his coup. In a plain-text
message to the British on November 23, 1943, he wired: "To Messrs.
Hunt, Bingham and Co., Successors Ltd., London. We understand you have
been endeavoring for some time to do business in Holland without our
assistance. We regret this ... since we have acted for so long as your
sole representative in this country. Nevertheless ... should you be
thinking of paying us a visit on the Continent on an extensive scale we
shall give your emissaries the same attention as we have hitherto.
..." As a result, although intelligence networks were purged and
completely revamped--and although Dutch resistance groups were separate
from these covert activities--nevertheless, many British senior
officers were warned before Operation Market-Garden against placing too
much trust in the underground.

In England, a little before 7 A.m. on the twentieth, Major General
Stanislaw Sosabowski learned that his drop zone had been changed. The
Polish Brigade would now land in an area a few miles west of the
original site, near the village of Driel. Sosabowski was stunned by
the news his liaison officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Stevens, had
brought. The brigade was already on the airfield and scheduled to
leave for Holland in three hours. Within that time Sosabowski had to
completely redesign his attack for an area that had not even been
studied. Days had gone into the planning for the drop near Elden on
the southern approaches of the Arnhem bridge. Now, he was to recall,
"I was given the bare bones of a scheme, with only a few hours to
develop a plan."

There was still very little news of Arnhem, but, as Stevens

briefed him on the new plan to ferry his troops across the Rhine from
Driel to Heveadorp, it was obvious to Sosabowski that Urquhart's
situation had taken a turn for the worse. He foresaw countless
problems, but he noted that "nobody else seemed unduly alarmed. All
Stevens had learned was that the picture was pretty confusing."
Quickly informing his staff of the new developments, Sosabowski
postponed the 10 A.m. takeoff until 1:00 P.m. He would need that time
to reorient his troopers and to devise new attack plans, and the
three-hour delay might enable Stevens to get more up-to-date
information on Arnhem. Sosabowski doubted that his force could have
been flown out at 10 A.m. in any case. Fog again covered the Midlands,
and the forecast was not reassuring. "That and the paucity of
information we received made me most anxious," Sosabowski recalled. "I
did not think that Urquhart's operation was going well. I began to
believe that we might be dropping into Holland to reinforce defeat."

At the Arnhem bridge the massive defiance by the valiant few was nearly
over. At dawn the Germans had renewed their terrifying bombardment.
In the morning light the stark pitted wrecks that had once been houses
and office buildings were again subjected to punishing fire. On each
side of the bridge and along the churned, mangled ruins of the Eusebius
Buiten Singel, the few strongholds that still remained were being
systematically blown apart. The semicircular defense line that had
protected the northern approaches had almost ceased to exist. Yet,
ringed by flames and sheltering behind rubble, small groups of
obstinate men continued to fight on, denying the Germans the bridge.

Only the rawest kind of courage had sustained Frost's men up to now,
but it had been fierce enough and constant enough to hold off the
Germans for three nights and two days. The 2nd Battalion and the men
from other units who had come by twos and threes to join it (a force
that by Frost's highest estimate never totaled more than six or seven
hundred men) had been welded together in their ordeal. Pride and
common purpose had fused them. Alone they had reached the objective of
an entire airborne division--and held out longer than the division was
meant to do. In the desperate, anxious hours, awaiting help that never
came, their common frame of mind was perhaps best summed up in the
thoughts of Lance Corporal Gordon Spicer, who wrote, "Who's failing in
their job? Not us!"

But now the time of their endurance had nearly run its course. Holed
up in ruins and slit trenches, struggling to protect themselves and
cellars full of wounded, shocked and concussed by nearly unceasing
enemy fire, and wearing their filthy blood-stained bandages and
impudent manners like badges of honor, the Red Devils knew, finally,
that they could no longer hold.

The discovery produced a curious calmness, totally devoid of panic. It
was as if men decided privately that they would fight until they
dropped--if only to provoke the Germans more. Despite their knowledge
that the fight was all but over, men invented still new ways to keep it
going. Troopers of mortar platoons fired their last few bombs without
tripods or base plates by standing the barrel up and holding it with
ropes. Others, discovering there were no more detonators for the
spring-loaded, Piat missile-throwers, tried instead to detonate the
bombs with fuses made from boxes of matches. All about them friends
lay dead or dying, and still they found the will to resist and, in
doing so, often amused one another. Men remember an Irish trooper
knocked unconscious by a shell burst opening his eyes at last to say,
"I'm dead." Then, thinking it over, he remarked, "I can't be. I'm
talking."

To Colonel John Frost, whose hunting horn had called them to him on the
sunny Sunday that was to be the opening of their

victory march, they would always remain unbeaten. Yet now, on this
dark and tragic Wednesday, he knew there was "practically no
possibility for relief."

The number of men still capable of fighting was, at best, between 150
and 200, concentrated mainly about the damaged headquarters buildings
on the western side of the ramp. Over 300 British and German wounded
filled the cellars. "They were crowded almost on top of each other,"
Frost noted, "making it difficult for doctors and orderlies to get
around and attend them." Soon he would have to make a decision about
these casualties. If the headquarters building was hit again, as it
was almost certain to be, Frost told Major Freddie Gough, he "did not
see how I can fight it out to the last minute, then go, and have our
wounded be roasted." Measures would have to be taken to get out
casualties before the building was demolished or overrun. Frost did
not know how much time was left. He still believed he could control
the approaches for a time, perhaps even another twenty-four hours, but
his perimeter defenses were now so weak that he knew "a determined rush
by the enemy could carry them into our midst."

On Captain Mackay's side of the ramp, the pulverized schoolhouse
looked, he thought, "like a sieve." As Mackay later recalled, "We were
alone. All the houses on the eastern side had been burned down, except
for one to the south, which was held by the Germans." And in the
schoolhouse, horror had piled on horror. "The men were exhausted and
filthy," Mackay wrote, "and I was sick to my stomach every time I
looked at them. Haggard, with bloodshot and red-rimmed eyes, almost
everyone had some sort of dirty field dressing and blood was
everywhere." As wounded were carried down the stairway to the cellar,
Mackay noted that "on each landing blood had formed in pools and ran in
small rivulets down the stairs." His remaining thirteen men were
huddled "in twos and threes, manning positions that required twice that
number. The only things that were clean were the men's weapons." In
the shell of the schoolhouse Mackay and his men

fought off three enemy attacks in two hours, leaving around four times
their number in enemy dead.

As morning wore on, the fighting continued. Then, around noon, the man
who had so stubbornly defied the Germans was wounded. As Frost met
with Major Douglas Crawley to discuss a fighting patrol to clear the
area, he remembers "a tremendous explosion" that lifted him off his
feet and threw him face downward several yards away. A mortar bomb had
exploded almost between the two men. Miraculously both were alive, but
shrapnel had torn into Frost's left ankle and right shinbone and
Crawley was hit in both legs and his right arm. Frost, barely
conscious, felt ashamed that he could not "resist the groans that
seemed to force themselves out of me, more particularly as Doug never
made a sound." Wicks, Frost's batman, helped drag the two officers to
cover and stretcher-bearers carried them to the cellar with the other
wounded.

In the crowded basement Father Egan tried to orient himself. In the
dim recesses of the chilly room, Lieutenant Bucky Buchanan, the
intelligence officer who had earlier helped to rescue Egan, appeared to
have propped himself up wearily against the wall. But Buchanan was
dead. A bomb blast had killed him outright without leaving a mark.
Then, dazed and still in shock, Egan saw Frost being carried in. "I
remember his face," Egan says. "He looked dead-tired and dejected."
Other wounded in the cellar saw their battalion commander, too. To
Lieutenant John Blunt, a friend of the dead Buchanan, the sight of the
Colonel on a stretcher was a crushing blow. "We subalterns had always
considered him irrepressible," Blunt wrote. "It hurt to see him
carried in like that. He had never given in to anything."

Across the room Private James Sims, who also had a shrapnel wound,
remembers somebody anxiously calling out to Frost, "Sir, can we still
hold out?"

In England, Major General Sosabowski watched his brigade board the long
lines of troop-carrier Dakotas. Ever since Sunday

he had felt the tension build as his Poles waited to go. They had made
the trip from their billets to the airfield on Tuesday only to have the
operation canceled. This Wednesday morning, learning of the change in
his drop zone, Sosabowski himself had postponed the flight by three
hours in order to work out new plans. Now, a little before 1 P.m., as
the heavily laden paratroopers moved toward the planes, the atmosphere
of impatience was gone. The men were on the way at last, and
Sosabowski noted "an almost lighthearted attitude among them."

His frame of mind was far different. In the few short hours since the
switch in plans he had tried to learn everything he could about
Urquhart's situation and the new drop zone. He had briefed his
three-battalion brigade down to platoon level but the information he
could give them was sparse. Sosabowski felt that they were
ill-prepared, almost "jumping into the unknown."

Now, as propellers ticked over, his battalions began to climb aboard
the 114 Dakotas that would take them to Holland. Satisfied with the
loading, Sosabowski hoisted himself into the lead plane. With engines
revving, the Dakota moved out, rolled slowly down the runway, turned
and made ready for takeoff. Then it paused. To Sosabowski's dismay,
the engines were throttled back. Minutes passed, and his anxiety grew.
He wondered what was delaying takeoff.

Suddenly the door opened and an R.a.f. officer climbed in. Making his
way up the aisle to the General, he informed Sosabowski that control
had just received word to halt the takeoff. The situation was a repeat
of Tuesday: the southern fields were open and bomber resupply planes
were taking off, but in the Grantham area a heavy overcast was settling
in. Sosabowski was incredulous. He could hear the curses of his
officers and men as the news was relayed. The flight was canceled for
twenty-four hours more--until 1 P.m. Thursday, September 21.

General Gavin's Glider Infantry Regiment too was grounded once again.
On this day of the vital Waal river assault at Nijmegen, Gavin's sorely
needed 3,400 men, with their guns and equipment, could not get out.
The Driel-Heveadorp ferry was

still in operation. On this crucial Wednesday, D plus 3, when the
Polish Brigade might have been ferried across the Rhine to strengthen
Urquhart's flagging troopers, the weather had struck again at
Market-Garden.

Field Marshal Walter Model was finally ready to open his
counteroffensive against the British and Americans in Holland. On this
critical Wednesday, September 20, the entire corridor erupted in one
German attack after another.

Model, his reinforcements steadily arriving, was certain that his
forces were now strong enough to wipe out Montgomery's attack. He
planned to pinch off the Allied corridor at Son, Veghel and Nijmegen.
The Arnhem bridge, he knew, was almost in his hands. And Von Zangen's
Fifteenth Army--the army that had been forgotten at Antwerp by
Montgomery--was now slowly renewing its strength. Staffs were being
newly organized, ammunition and supplies were arriving daily. Within
forty-eight hours, in Army Group B's war diary, Annex 2342, Model would
report Von Zangen's status to Von Rundstedt in these terms: "The total
number of personnel and equipment ferried across the Schelde by the
Fifteenth Army totals 82,000 men; 530 guns; 4,600 vehicles; over 4,000
horses and a large amount of valuable material. ..." * * Although
these are the exact figures quoted from Army Group B's diary, they seem
excessive particularly in the number of guns, vehicles and horses. The
evacuation of the Fifteenth Army across the Schelde and around Antwerp
was directed by General Eugene Felix Schwalbe. In 1946 he gave the
following estimate: 65,000 men, 225 guns, 750 trucks and wagons and
1,000 horses (see Milton Shulman, Defeat in the West, p. 180). I
cannot explain the discrepancy, but Schwalbe's figures seem much more
realistic.

Model was now so confident of Von Zangen's ability to take over that
within seventy-two hours he planned to completely reorganize his own
command structure. Von Zangen would command all Army Group B forces
west of the Allied corridor; General Student's First Parachute Army,
now being systematically reinforced, would be assigned the eastern
side. The moment had come for Model to begin his offensive with sharp
probing attacks.

At the Son bridge on the morning of the twentieth, panzer forces,
striking into the 101/'s area, almost succeeded in taking the bridge.
Only quick action by General Taylor's men and British tanks held off
the attack. Simultaneously, as Horrocks' columns sped toward Nijmegen,
the entire stretch of Taylor's sector came under pressure.

At 11 A.m. in General Gavin's area, German troops, preceded by a heavy
bombardment, advanced out of the Reichswald and attacked the 82nd's
eastern flank. Within a few hours a full-scale drive was in progress
in the Mook area, threatening the Heumen bridge. Rushing to the scene
from Nijmegen, where his men were preparing to assault the Waal, Gavin
saw that "the only bridge we owned that would take armor" was in
serious jeopardy. "It was essential to the survival of the British and
Americans crowded into Nijmegen," he recalls. His problem was acute;
every available 82nd unit was already committed. Hurriedly Gavin asked
for help from the Coldstream Guards. Then, with Gavin personally
leading the counterattack, a bitter, unrelenting battle began that was
to last all day. Shifting his forces back and forth like chess men,
Gavin held out and eventually forced the Germans to withdraw. He had
always feared attack from the Reichswald. Now Gavin and the Corps
commander, General Browning, knew that a new and more terrible phase of
the fighting had begun. Among the prisoners taken were men from
General Mendl's tough II Parachute Corps. Model's intention was now
obvious: key bridges were to be grabbed, the corridor was to be
squeezed and Horrocks' columns crushed.

For his part, Model was convinced that the Allies would never cross at
Nijmegen and drive the last eleven miles to Arnhem. Within the week,
he confidently told General Bittrich, he expected the battle to be
over. Bittrich was less assured. He would feel happier, he told
Model, if the Nijmegen bridges were destroyed. Model looked at him and
angrily shouted, "No!"

Major General Heinz Harmel was annoyed by the attitude of his superior,
General Wilhelm Bittrich. The II SS Panzer Corps commander had adopted
too far-sighted a view of the battle, Harmel felt. Bittrich "seemed to
have closed his mind completely to the ferrying problems at Pannerden."
Those problems had hampered Harmel from the beginning, yet it appeared
to him that Bittrich never remained long enough at the site "to see for
himself the almost impossible task of getting twenty tanks across the
river--and three of them were Royal Tigers." It had taken Harmel's
engineers nearly three days to build a ferry capable of carrying an
estimated 40-ton load across the Rhine. Although Harmel believed the
operation could now be accelerated, only three platoons of tanks
(twelve Panthers) had so far reached the vicinity of Nijmegen. The
remainder, including his Tiger tanks, were fighting at the Arnhem
bridge under the veteran eastern front commander, Major Hans Peter
Knaust.

The thirty-eight-year-old Knaust had lost a leg in battle near Moscow
in 1941. As Harmel recalls, "he stomped about with a wooden one and,
although he was always in pain, he never once complained." Yet, Knaust
too was the target for much of Harmel's displeasure.

To reinforce the Frundsberg Division, the "Knaust Kampfgruppe" had been
rushed to Holland with thirty-five tanks, five armored personnel
carriers and one self-propelled gun. But Knaust's veterans were of low
caliber. Almost all of them had been badly wounded at one time or
another; in Harmel's view they were "close to being invalids." Under
normal conditions the men would not have been in active service.
Additionally, Knaust's replacements were young, and many had had only
eight weeks' training. The Arnhem bridge battle had gone on so long
that Harmel was now fearful of the situation at Nijmegen. In case the
British broke through, he would need Knaust's tanks to hold the bridge
and defense positions between Nijmegen and Arnhem. More armored
reinforcements were on the way, including fifteen to twenty Tiger tanks
and another twenty Panthers. But Harmel had no idea when they would
arrive or whether the Arnhem

bridge would be open to speed their drive south. Even after its
capture, Harmel envisioned a full day to clear the wreckage and get
vehicles moving.

To oversee all operations, Harmel had set up an advance command post
near the village of Doornenburg, two miles west of Pannerden and six
miles northeast of Nijmegen. From there he drove west to roughly the
mid-point of the Nijmegen-Arnhem highway to study the terrain,
automatically fixing in his mind defense positions that might be used
if a breakthrough occurred. His reconnaissance produced one clear
impression: it seemed impossible for either British or German tanks to
leave the highway. Only light vehicles could travel the thinly
surfaced, brick-paved, secondary roads. His own tanks, moving to
Nijmegen after crossing at Pannerden, had bogged down on just such
roads, their weight crumbling the pavement. The main Nijmegen-Arnhem
highway was, in places, a dike road, nine to twelve feet above soft
polder on either side. Tanks moving along these high stretches would
be completely exposed, silhouetted against the sky. Well-sited
artillery could easily pick them off. At the moment, Harmel had almost
no artillery covering the highway; thus it was imperative that Knaust's
tanks and guns get across the Rhine and in position before a British
breakthrough could occur at Nijmegen.

Returning to his headquarters at Doornenburg, Harmel heard the latest
reports from his chief of staff, Colonel Paetsch. There was good news
from Arnhem: more prisoners were being taken, and the fighting at the
bridge was beginning to break up. Knaust now believed he might have
the crossing by late afternoon. Fighting continued in Nijmegen, but
Captain Karl Heinz Euling, although taking heavy casualties, was
containing all efforts to seize the railway and road bridges there.
The Americans and British had been stopped at both approaches. In the
center of the city British forces had been held up too, but that
situation was more precarious.

Euling's report reflected an optimism that Harmel did not share.
Eventually, by sheer weight of numbers, British armor would surely
overrun the German line. Lighting a cigar, Harmel

told Paetsch that he "expected the full weight of the Anglo-American
attack to be thrown at the highway bridge within forty-eight hours."
If Knaust's tanks and artillerymen secured the Arnhem bridge quickly,
they might halt the British armored drive. Should the panzers be slow
in forcing the little band of British from the Arnhem bridge and
clearing it of wreckage, Harmel knew that, against all orders, he must
blow the Nijmegen highway bridge.

For all his careful consideration, he did not envision a most
preposterous scheme: that the American paratroopers might try to ford
the river in a major amphibious assault.

Waiting paratroopers crowded the area not far from the crossing site,
one mile downstream from the Nijmegen railway bridge. Throughout
Tuesday night and well into Wednesday morning, as the Anglo-American
forces under Lieutenant Colonel Goulburn and Lieutenant Colonel
Vandervoort continued the battle for the railroad and highway bridges
to the east, American and British soldiers labored to widen the area
leading to the river bank so that the tanks and heavy artillery of the
Guards Armored Division could take up firing positions to support the
assault. Typhoons were scheduled to fly low over the northern bank
thirty minutes before H Hour, spraying the entire area with rocket and
machine-gun fire. On the ground, tanks and artillery would pound the
site for another fifteen minutes. Then, under a smoke screen laid down
by tanks, the first wave of men led by twenty-seven-year-old Major
Julian Cook were to set out in one of the most daring river crossings
ever made.

The plan was as thorough as commanders working throughout the night
could make it. But the boats in which Cook's troopers would cross the
100-yard-wide river had not arrived. H Hour, originally set for 1
P.m., was postponed until 3 P.m.

In small groups the Americans waited as Cook paced up and down. "Where
are the damned boats?" he wondered. Ever since he had been told by
General Gavin and the 504th regimental commander, Colonel Tucker, that
his 3rd Battalion would make the Waal assault crossing, Cook had been
"shocked and dumfounded." It seemed to the young West Pointer that "we
were being asked to make an Omaha beach landing all by ourselves."
Many of his men had never even been in a small boat.

Cook was not the only one anxiously awaiting the arrival of the boats.
Before noon General Frederick Browning had received the first clear
indication of the seriousness of Urquhart's situation. Received via
British Second Army communications, the Phantom message read in part:

(201105) ... 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. Fighting
intense and opposition extremely strong. Position not too good.

Browning was deeply disturbed. Every hour now mattered and the quick
seizure of the Nijmegen bridges was vital to the survival of Urquhart's
men. The relief of the Arnhem defenders was, at this moment, almost
solely up to Cook and the 3rd Battalion--a fact of which Cook was
unaware.

In any event, the boats were not at hand, and no one even knew what
they were like. All through the night General Horrocks and his staff
had been trying to speed their arrival. Far back in the engineering
convoys three trucks carrying the craft had been inching their way up
the jam-packed road. Back in Eindhoven they had been held up by a
fierce Luftwaffe bombing attack. The whole center of the city was
devastated. Scores of supply trucks had been destroyed and an entire
ammunition convoy had been ignited, adding to the carnage. Now, at the
Waal crossing less

than one hour before H hour, there was still no sign of the trucks and
the vital boats.

The assault site lay to the east of the massive PGEM electrical power
plant, and originally it was believed that the crossing could be made
from the plant itself. There, at the river's edge, a small inlet
afforded protection for the loading, unobserved by the Germans.
Colonel Tucker had rejected the site; it was too close to the
enemy-held railway bridge. As the troopers emerged from the dock area,
the Germans could sweep each assault wave with machine-gun fire. Here,
too, at the mouth of the inlet, the 8- to 10-mile-an-hour current
swirled stronger. Shifting farther west, Tucker planned to have the
men rush the boats at double time down to the river's edge, launch them
and paddle across. That, too, worried Cook. From the little he had
learned, each craft weighed about 200 pounds; when they were loaded
with the men's equipment and ammunition, that figure would probably
double.

Once launched, each boat would carry thirteen paratroopers and a crew
of three engineers to row the men across. The operation would be
continuous. In wave after wave the assault craft were to cross back
and forth until the whole of Cook's battalion and part of another,
under Captain John Harrison, were across. Major Edward G. Tyler of the
Irish Guards, whose tanks were to give fire support, was appalled by
the whole concept. "It put the fear of God in me," Tyler recalls. He
asked the cigar-chewing Colonel Tucker if his men had ever practiced
this kind of operation before. "No," Tucker replied laconically.
"They're getting on-the-job training."

From the ninth floor of the power plant, Cook and Lieutenant Colonel
Giles Vandeleur, commanding the Irish Guards' 2nd Battalion, observed
the north shore through binoculars. Directly across from where they
stood, flat ground ran inland from the river's edge for 200 to 800
yards. Cook's men would have to cross this unprotected stretch after
they landed. Beyond the level shore, a sloping dike embankment rose
some 15 to 20 feet high,

and topping it was a 20-foot-wide road running west to east. A squat
building, called Fort Hof Van Holland, stood about 800 yards beyond the
road. Cook and Vandeleur could clearly see enemy troops in position
along the top of the embankment, and they were almost sure that
observation and artillery posts were positioned inside the fort.
"Somebody," Cook remembers thinking, "has come up with a real
nightmare." Yet, effective H-Hour air and artillery support could
soften the German resistance and enable the troopers to command the
northern bank quickly. Cook was counting heavily on that support.

Vandeleur thought the crossing might prove "ghastly, with heavy
casualties." But he intended his tanks to support the Americans to the
utmost. He planned to use about thirty Sherman tanks--two squadrons
under command of Major Edward G. Tyler and Major Desmond FitzGerald.
At 2:30 P.m., the tanks were to move toward the river and mount the
embankment, "track-to-track," their 75 mm. guns lined up to pound the
far shore. This British bombardment would be reinforced by the 82nd's
mortar and artillery fire. In all, 100 guns would batter the northern
bank.

Cook's men, who had not seen the actual assault area as yet, had taken
the briefing in their stride. But the width of the river shocked
everyone. "At first when we were briefed, we thought they were
joking," recalls Second Lieutenant John Holabird. "It all sounded too
fantastic." Sergeant Theodore Finkbeiner, scheduled for the first
wave, was sure that "our chances were pretty good because of the smoke
screen." But Captain T. Moffatt Burriss, commander of I Company,
believed the plan was nothing short of a suicide mission.

So did the 504th's Protestant chaplain, Captain Delbert Kuehl.
Normally Kuehl would not have gone in with assault troops. Now he
requested permission to be with Cook's men. "It was the hardest
decision I ever made," he recalls, "because I was going on my own
volition. The plan seemed absolutely impossible, and I felt if ever
the men needed me, it would be on this operation."

Captain Henry Baldwin Keep, who was known as the battalion's
millionaire because he was a member of the Philadelphia Biddle family,
considered that "the odds were very much against us. In eighteen
months of almost steady combat we had done everything from parachute
jumps to establishing bridgeheads to acting as mountain troops and as
regular infantry. But a river crossing was something else! It sounded
impossible."

Cook, according to Lieutenant Virgil Carmichael, tried to lighten the
atmosphere by announcing that he would imitate George Washington by
"standing erect in the boat and, with clenched right fist pushed
forward, shout, "Onward, men! Onward!"" Captain Carl W. Kappel,
commander of H Company, who had heard that the Arnhem attack was in
trouble, was deeply concerned. He wanted "to get in the damn boat and
get the hell across." He had a good friend in the British 1/ Airborne,
and he felt if anyone was on the Arnhem bridge it was "Frosty"--Colonel
John Frost.

By 2 P.m. there was still no sign of the assault craft, and now it was
too late to recall the approaching squadrons of Typhoons. Back of the
jump-off site, hidden behind the river embankment, Cook's men and
Vandeleur's tanks waited. At precisely 2:30 P.m. the Typhoon strike
began. Flashing overhead, the planes peeled off and screamed down, one
after another, shooting rockets and machine-gun fire at the enemy
positions. Ten minutes later, as Vandeleur's tanks began taking up
positions on the embankment, the three trucks carrying the assault
craft arrived. With only twenty minutes to go, Cook's men saw, for the
first time, the flimsy collapsible green boats.

Each boat was nineteen feet long with a flat, reinforced plywood
bottom. The canvas sides, held in place by wooden pegs, measured
thirty inches from floor to gunwales. Eight paddles, four feet long,
were supposed to accompany each boat, but in many there were only two.
Men would have to use their rifle butts to paddle.

Quickly engineers began assembling the boats. As each was put

together, the paratroopers assigned to the craft loaded their equipment
on board and got ready to dash for the bank. Against the deafening din
of the barrage now lashing the far shore, the twenty-six boats were
finally assembled. "Somebody yelled, "Go!"" First Lieutenant Patrick
Mulloy recalls, "and everybody grabbed the gunwales and started to lug
the boats down to the river. From the rear, shells screamed over the
men's heads; tank guns barked from the embankment ahead of them, and
white smoke, "looking fairly thick" to Mulloy, drifted over the width
of the river. The assault was on.

As the first wave of some 260 men--two companies, H and I, plus
headquarters staff and engineers--got to the water the launching
immediately began to assume the proportions of a disaster. Boats put
into too-shallow water bogged down in the mud and would not budge.
Struggling and thrashing in the shallows, men carried them to deeper
parts, pushed them out and then climbed in. As some troopers tried to
hoist themselves aboard, their boats overturned. Other boats,
overloaded, were caught by the current and began circling out of
control. Some sank under their heavy loads. Paddles were lost; men
fell overboard. Captain Carl Kappel saw the scene as one "of mass
confusion." His boat began to founder. "Private Legacie was in the
water and starting to go down," Kappel remembers. Diving in after him,
Kappel was surprised at the swiftness of the current. He was able to
grab Legacie and pull him to safety "but by the time I got him to the
bank I was an old man and worn out." Jumping into another boat Kappel
started out again. First Lieutenant Tom MacLeod's craft was almost
awash, and he thought they were sinking. "Paddles were flaying like
mad," he remembers, and all he could hear above the din was Cook's
voice, from a nearby boat, yelling, "Keep going! Keep going!"

The Major, a devout Catholic, was also praying out loud. Lieutenant
Virgil Carmichael noticed that he had developed a kind of cadence with
each line. "Hail Mary-- full of Grace--Hail Mary--full of Grace," Cook
chanted with every stroke of the

paddle. * Then, in the midst of the confusion, the Germans opened up.
* ""The Lord is with Thee" was too long," Cook says, "so I kept
repeating, "Hail Mary" (one stroke), "Full of Grace" (second stroke)."
Captain Keep tried to remember his crewing days at Princeton but he
found himself nervously counting "7-from-go-go-go-have-i."

The fire was so intense and concentrated that it reminded Lieutenant
Mulloy of "the worst we ever took at Anzio. They were blazing away
with heavy machine guns and mortars, most of it coming from the
embankment and the railroad bridge. I felt like a sitting duck."
Chaplain Kuehl was sick with horror. The head of the man sitting next
to him was blown off. Over and over Kuehl kept repeating "Lord, Thy
will be done."

From his command post in the PGEM building, Lieutenant Colonel
Vandeleur, along with General Browning and General Horrocks, watched in
grim silence. "It was a horrible, horrible sight," Vandeleur
remembers. "Boats were literally blown out of the water. Huge geysers
shot up as shells hit and small-arms fire from the northern bank made
the river look like a seething cauldron." Instinctively men began to
crouch in the boats. Lieutenant Holabird, staring at the fragile
canvas sides, felt "totally exposed and defenseless." Even his helmet
"seemed about as small as a beanie."

Shrapnel ripped through the little fleet. The boat carrying half of
First Lieutenant James Megellas' platoon sank without a trace. There
were no survivors. First Lieutenant Allen McLain saw two craft blown
apart and troopers thrown into the water. Around Captain T. Moffatt
Burriss' boat fire was coming down "like a hailstorm," and finally the
engineer steering the boat said, "Take the rudder. I'm hit." His
wrist was shattered. As Burriss leaned over to help, the engineer was
hit again, this time in the head. Shell fragments caught Burriss in
the side. As the engineer fell overboard, his foot caught the gunwale,
causing his body to act like a rudder and swinging the boat around.
Burriss had to heave the dead man into the water. By then two more
troopers sitting in front had also been killed.

Under a brisk wind the smoke screen had been blown to tatters.

Now German gunners raked each boat individually. Sergeant Clark Fuller
saw that some men, in their haste to get across quickly, and
desperately trying to avoid the fire, "rowed against each other,
causing their boats to swing around in circles." The Germans picked
them off easily. Fuller was "so scared that he felt paralyzed."
Halfway across, Private Leonard G. Tremble was suddenly slammed into
the bottom of the boat. His craft had taken a direct hit. Wounded in
the face, shoulder, right arm and left leg, Tremble was sure he was
bleeding to death. Taking water, the boat swung crazily in circles,
then drifted slowly back to the southern shore, everyone in it dead but
Tremble.

In the command post Vandeleur saw that "huge gaps had begun to appear
in the smoke screen." His tankers had fired smoke shells for more than
ten minutes, but now the Guardsmen were running low on every kind of
ammunition. "The Germans had switched ammunition and were beginning to
use big stuff, and I remember almost trying to will the Americans to go
faster. It was obvious that these young paratroopers were
inexperienced in handling assault boats, which are not the easiest
things to maneuver. They were zigzagging all over the water."

Then the first wave reached the northern bank. Men struggled out of
the boats, guns firing, and started across the exposed flat land.
Sergeant Clark Fuller, who a few minutes before had been paralyzed with
fear, was so happy to be alive that he felt "exhilarated. My fear had
been replaced by a surge of recklessness. I felt I could lick the
whole German army." Vandeleur, watching the landing, "saw one or two
boats hit the beach, followed immediately by three or four others.
Nobody paused. Men got out and began running toward the embankment.
My God, what a courageous sight it was! They just moved steadily
across that open ground. I never saw a single man lie down until he
was hit. I didn't think more than half the fleet made it across."
Then, to Vandeleur's amazement, "the boats turned around and started
back for the second wave." Turning to Horrocks, General Browning said,
"I have never seen a more gallant action."

As Julian Cook's assault craft neared the beach he jumped out

and pulled the boat, eager to get ashore. Suddenly to his right he saw
a bubbling commotion in the gray water. "It looked like a large air
bubble, steadily approaching the bank," he remembers. "I thought I was
seeing things when the top of a helmet broke the surface and continued
on moving. Then a face appeared under the helmet. It was the little
machine-gunner, Private Joseph Jedlicka. He had bandoliers of
30-caliber machine-gun bullets draped around his shoulders and a box in
either hand." Jedlicka had fallen overboard in eight feet of water
and, holding his breath, had calmly walked across the river bottom
until he emerged.

Medics were already working on the beach and as First Lieutenant Tom
MacLeod prepared to return across the Waal for another boatload of
troopers, he saw that rifles had been stuck in the ground next to the
fallen.

Shortly after 4 P.m., General Heinz Harmel received an alarming message
at his headquarters in Doornenburg. It was reported that "a white
smoke screen has been thrown across the river opposite Fort Hof Van
Holland." Harmel, with some of his staff, rushed by car to the village
of Lent, on the northern bank of the Waal, a mile from the Nijmegen
highway bridge. The smoke could mean only one thing: the
Anglo-Americans were trying to cross the Waal by boat. Still, Harmel
could not believe his own analysis. The width of the river, the forces
manning the northern bank, Euling's optimistic report of the morning,
and his own estimate of the British and American forces in Nijmegen--
all argued against the operation. But Harmel decided to see for
himself. He remembers that "I had no intention of being arrested and
shot by Berlin for letting the bridges fall into enemy hands--no matter
how Model felt about it."

Major Julian Cook knew his losses were appalling, but he had no time to
assess them now. His companies had landed everywhere along the exposed
stretch of beach. Units were inextricably mixed up and, for the time,
without organization. The Germans were flaying the beach with
machine-gun fire, yet his stubborn troopers refused to be pinned down.
Individually and in twos and threes they headed for the embankment.
"It was either stay and get riddled or move," Cook remembers.
Struggling forward, the men, armed with machine guns, grenades and
fixed bayonets, charged the embankment and viciously dug the Germans
out. Sergeant Theodore Finkbeiner believes he was one of the first to
reach the high dike roadway. "I stuck my head over the top, and stared
right into the muzzle of a machine gun," he recalls. He ducked, but
"the muzzle blast blew my helmet off." Finkbeiner tossed a grenade
into the German emplacement, heard the explosion and the sound of men
screaming. Then he quickly hoisted himself up onto the embankment road
and headed for the next machine-gun nest.

Captain Moffatt Burriss had no time to think about the shrapnel wound
in his side. When he landed he was "so happy to be alive that I
vomited." He ran straight for the dike, yelling to his men to get "one
machine gun firing on the left flank, another on the right." They did.
Burriss saw several houses back of the dike. Kicking the door of one
open, he surprised "several Germans who had been sleeping, apparently
unaware of what was happening." Reaching quickly for a hand grenade,
Burriss pulled the pin, threw it into the room and slammed the door.

In the smoke, noise and confusion, some men in the first wave did not
remember how they got off the beach. Corporal Jack Bommer, a
communications man laden down with equipment, simply ran forward. He
"had only one thing in mind: to survive if possible." He knew he had
to get to the embankment and wait for further instructions. On
reaching the crest he saw "dead bodies everywhere, and Germans--some no
more than fifteen years old, others in their sixties--who a few minutes
before had been slaughtering us in the boats were now begging for
mercy, trying

to surrender." Men were too shocked by their ordeal and too angry at
the death of friends to take many prisoners. Bommer recalls that some
Germans "were shot out of hand at point-blank range."

Sickened and exhausted by the crossing, their dead and wounded lying on
the beach, the men of the first wave subdued the German defenders on
the dike road in less than thirty minutes. Not all the enemy positions
had been overrun, but now troopers hunched down in former German
machine-gun nests to protect the arrival of succeeding waves. Two more
craft were lost in the second crossing. And, still under heavy
shellfire, exhausted engineers in the eleven remaining craft made five
more trips to bring all the Americans across the bloodstained Waal.
Speed was all that mattered now. Cook's men had to grab the northern
ends of the crossings before the Germans fully realized what was
happening--and before they blew the bridges.

By now the embankment defense line had been overrun, and the Germans
were pulling back to secondary positions. Cook's troopers gave them no
quarter. Captain Henry Keep comments that "what remained of the
battalion seemed driven to fever pitch and, rendered crazy by rage, men
temporarily forgot the meaning of fear. I have never witnessed this
human metamorphosis so acutely displayed as on this day. It was an
awe-inspiring sight but not a pretty one."

Individually and in small groups, men who had sat helpless in the boats
as friends died all around them took on four and five times their
number with grenades, submachine guns and bayonets. With brutal
efficiency they dug the Germans out and, without stopping to rest or
regroup, continued their rampaging assault. They fought through
fields, orchards and houses back of the embankment under the fire of
machine guns and antiaircraft batteries hammering at them from Fort Hof
Van Holland directly ahead. As some groups headed due east along the
sunken dike road for the bridges, others stormed the fort, almost
oblivious to the German guns. Some troopers, laden with grenades, swam
the moat surrounding the fortress and began climbing the walls.

Sergeant Leroy Richmond, swimming underwater, took the enemy soldier
guarding the causeway by surprise, then waved his men across.
According to First Lieutenant Virgil F. Carmichael, troopers "somehow
climbed to the top of the fort, then others below tossed up hand
grenades which were promptly dropped into the turret portholes, one
after the other." The German defenders quickly surrendered.

Meanwhile, units from two companies-- Captain Burriss' I Company and
Captain Kappel's H Company--were sprinting for the bridges. At the
railroad bridge, H Company found the German defense so fierce that it
looked as though the American attack might stall. * Then the
continuing pressure from the British and American forces at the
southern end and in Nijmegen itself caused the enemy suddenly to crack.
To Kappel's amazement the Germans began to retreat across the bridge
"in wholesale numbers"--right into the American guns. From his tank
near the PGEM factory, Lieutenant John Gorman "could see what looked
like hundreds of Germans, confused and panic-stricken, running across
the bridge right toward the Americans." On the northern bank First
Lieutenant Richard La Riviere and Lieutenant E. J. Sims also saw them
coming. In disbelief, they watched as the Germans abandoned their guns
and hurried toward the northern exit. "They were coming across in a
mass," recalls La Riviere, "and we let them come--two thirds of the
way." Then the Americans opened fire. * According to Charles B.
MacDonald, in The Siegfried Line Campaign, p. 181, the Germans on the
bridge had a formidable array of armament which included 34 machine
guns, two 20 mm. antiaircraft guns and one 88 mm. dual-purpose gun.

A hail of bullets ripped into the defenders. Germans fell
everywhere--some into the girders under the bridge; others to the water
below. More than 260 lay dead, many were wounded, and scores more were
taken prisoner before the firing ceased. Within two hours of the Waal
river assault, the first of the bridges had fallen. Major Edward G.
Tyler of the Irish Guards saw "someone waving. I had been
concentrating so long on that railroad bridge that, for me, it was the
only one in existence. I got on the wireless

and radioed Battalion, "They're on the bridge! They've got the
bridge!"" The time was 5 P.m. Captain Tony Heywood of the Grenadier
Guards received Major Tyler's message and found it "utterly confusing."
Which bridge did the message refer to? The Grenadiers under
Lieutenant Colonel Goulburn were still fighting alongside Colonel
Vandervoort's troopers near the Valkhof, where Euling's SS forces
continued to deny them the highway bridge. If the message meant that
the highway bridge had been taken, Heywood remembers, "I couldn't
figure how they had gotten across."

The railroad bridge was intact and physically in Anglo-American hands,
but Germans--either prepared to fight to the last or too frightened to
leave their positions--were still on it. The Americans had made a
quick search for demolition charges at the northern end. Although they
had found nothing, there was still a chance that the bridge was wired
and ready to be destroyed. Captain Kappel now radioed Major Cook,
urging him to get British tanks across as quickly is possible. With
these as support, he and Captain Burriss of I Company believed, they
could grab the big prize, the Nijmegen highway bridge, slightly less
than a mile east. Then, recalls Kappel, Colonel Tucker arrived. The
request, Tucker said, "had been relayed, but the Germans might blow
both bridges at any moment." Without hesitation Cook's troopers pushed
on for the highway bridge.

General Harmel could not make out what was happening. Binoculars to
his eyes, he stood on the roof of a bunker near the village of Lent.
From this position on the northern bank of the Waal barely a mile from
the main Nijmegen highway bridge, he could see smoke and haze off to
his right and hear the crash of battle. But no one seemed to know
exactly what was taking place, except that an attempt had been made to
cross the river near the railroad bridge. He could see the highway
bridge quite clearly; there was nothing on it. Then, as Harmel
recalls, "the wounded

started to arrive, and I began to get conflicting reports." Americans,
he learned, had crossed the river, "but everything was exaggerated. I
could not tell if they had come across in ten boats or a hundred." His
mind "working furiously trying to decide what to do next," Harmel
checked with his engineers. "I was informed that both bridges were
ready to go," he remembers. "The local commander was instructed to
destroy the railroad bridge. The detonator for the highway bridge was
hidden in a garden near the bunker at Lent, and a man was stationed
there awaiting orders to press the plunger." Then Harmel received his
first clear report: only a few boats had crossed the river, and the
battle was still in progress. Looking through his binoculars again, he
saw that the highway bridge was still clear and free of movement.
Although his "instinct was to get this troublesome bridge weighing on
my shoulders destroyed, I had no intention of doing anything until I
was absolutely sure that it was lost." If he was forced to blow the
highway bridge, Harmel decided, he would make sure that "it was crowded
with British tanks and let them go up in the blast, too."

In Huner Park and in the Valkhof close by the southern approaches to
the highway bridge, Captain Karl Euling's SS Panzer Grenadiers were
fighting for their lives. The Anglo-American attack by Lieutenant
Colonel Edward Goulburn's Grenadier Guards and Lieutenant Colonel Ben
Vandervoort's 2nd Battalion of the 82nd's 505th Regiment was methodical
and relentless. Vandervoort's mortars and artillery pounded the German
defense line as his men sprinted from house to house. Closing the gap
between themselves and Euling's steadily shrinking defenses, Goulburn's
tanks moved up the converging streets, driving the Germans before them,
their 17-pounders and machine guns blasting.

The Germans fought back hard. "It was the heaviest volume of fire I
ever encountered," recalls Sergeant Spencer Wurst, then a

nineteen-year-old veteran who had been with the 82nd since North
Africa. "I had the feeling I could reach up and grab bullets with each
hand." From his vantage point on the ledge of a house some twenty-five
yards from the Valkhof, Wurst could look down into the German
positions. "There were foxholes all over the park," he remembers, "and
all the action seemed to be centered from these and from a medieval
tower. I watched our men break out from right and left and charge
right up to the traffic circle. We were so anxious to get that bridge
that I saw some men crawl over to the foxholes and literally drag the
Germans out." Wurst's own rifle barrel was so hot that cosmoline began
to ooze from the wood stock.

As the murderous fire fight continued Wurst was astounded to see
Colonel Vandervoort "stroll across the street, smoking a cigarette. He
stopped in front of the house I was in, looked up and said, "Sergeant,
I think you better go see if you can get that tank moving.""
Vandervoort pointed to the entrance to the park where a British tank
was sitting, its turret closed. Clambering off the roof, Wurst ran to
the tank and rapped on its side with his helmet. The turret opened.
"Colonel wants you to move it," Wurst said. "Come on. I'll show you
where to fire." Advancing beside the tank in full view of the Germans,
Wurst pointed out targets. As the intense fire coming from
Vandervoort's men and Goulburn's tanks increased, the enemy defense
ring began to collapse. The formidable line of antitank guns that had
stopped each previous attack was obliterated. Finally only four
self-propelled guns dug into the center of the traffic circle remained
firing. Then, a little after 4 P.m., in an all-out tank and infantry
assault, these too were overrun. As Vandervoort's troopers charged
with bayonets and grenades, Goulburn lined his tanks up four abreast
and sent them charging into the park. In panic the Germans broke. As
they retreated, some tried to take cover in the girders of the bridge;
others, farther away, raced through the American and British fire
toward the medieval fort. As the Germans passed, scores of troopers
lobbed grenades into their midst. The assault was over. "They had
given us a real tough time," Wurst says. "We watched

them charging right past us, up over the road leading onto the bridge
and some went off to the east. We felt pretty good."

General Allan Adair, commander of the Guards Armored Division,
directing operations in a nearby building, remembers "gritting my
teeth, dreading the sound of an explosion that would tell me the
Germans had blown the bridge." He heard nothing. The approaches to
the great Waal bridge lay open, the span itself apparently intact.

Sergeant Peter Robinson's troop of four tanks had been waiting for just
this moment. Now they moved out for the bridge. * The
twenty-nine-year-old Dunkirk veteran had been alerted a few hours
earlier by his squadron leader, Major John Trotter, "to stand ready to
go for the bridge." Germans were still on the crossing, and Trotter
now warned Robinson, "We don't know what to expect when you cross, but
the bridge has to be taken. Don't stop for anything." Shaking hands
with the sergeant, Trotter added jokingly, "Don't worry. I know where
your wife lives and if anything happens, I'll let her know." Robinson
was not amused. "You're bloody cheerful, aren't you, sir?" he asked
Trotter. Climbing onto his tank, Robinson led off for the bridge. *
It has been said that an American flag was raised on the north end of
the railroad bridge and, in the smoke and confusion, British tankers
thought it was flying on the far end of the highway bridge--signaling
the American seizure of that end. The story may be true, but in scores
of interviews I have not found a single participant who confirmed it.
I have walked over the entire area and it seems inconceivable that
anyone looking across the highway bridge could mistake a flag flying a
mile to the west as the terminus of this crossing.

The troop of four tanks came into Huner Park by the right of the
roundabout. To Robinson it appeared that "the whole town was burning.
Buildings to my left and right were on fire." Wreathed in smoke, the
great crossing looked "damned big." As Robinson's tank rumbled forward
he reported constantly by radio to division headquarters. "Everyone
else had been ordered off the air," he recalls. Clanking onto the
approaches, Robinson remembers, "We came under heavy fire. There was
an explosion. One of the idler wheels carrying the track on one side
of the tank had been hit." The tank was still running, although "the
wireless was dead and I had lost touch with headquarters." Shouting to
his

driver to reverse, Robinson backed his tank to the side of the road.
Quickly the sergeant jumped out, ran to the tank behind him and told
its commander, Sergeant Billingham, to get out. Billingham began to
argue. Robinson shouted that he was giving "a direct order. Get out
of that tank damned quick and follow along in mine." The third tank in
line, commanded by Sergeant Charles W. Pacey, had pulled out and was
leading the way onto the bridge. Jumping aboard Billingham's tank,
Robinson ordered the others to follow. As the four tanks advanced,
Robinson recalls, they came under fire from a "big 88 parked on the
other side of the river, near some burning houses and from what
appeared to be a self-propelled gun in the far distance."

Colonel Vandervoort, watching the tanks, saw the 88 begin to fire. "It
was pretty spectacular," he recalls. "The 88 was sandbagged into the
side of the highway about one hundred yards from the north end of the
bridge. One tank and the 88 exchanged about four rounds apiece with
the tank spitting 30-caliber tracers all the while. In the gathering
dusk it was quite a show." Then Robinson's gunner, Guardsman Leslie
Johnson, got the 88 with another shot. Germans with grenades, rifles
and machine guns clung to the girders of the bridge, Robinson
remembers. The tank machine guns began "to knock them off like
ninepins." And Johnson, answering the heavy enemy artillery fire,
"pumped shells through his gun as fast as the loader could run them
through." In a hail of fire Robinson's troop rattled forward, now
approaching the halfway mark on the highway bridge.

In the twilight, billowing smoke clogged the distant Waal highway
bridge. At his forward position near Lent, General Heinz Harmel stared
through his binoculars. Guns were banging all around him, and troops
were moving back through the village to take up new positions.
Harmel's worst fear had now been realized. The Americans, against all
expectations, had succeeded in making a bold, successful crossing of
the Waal. In Nijmegen

itself the optimism of Captain Karl Euling had proved unfounded. The
last message received from him had been terse: Euling said he was
encircled with only sixty men left. Now Harmel knew beyond doubt that
the bridges were lost. He did not know whether the railroad bridge had
been destroyed, but if he was to demolish the highway bridge, it must
be done immediately.

"Everything seemed to pass through my mind all at once," he recalled.
"What must be done first? What is the most urgent, most important
action to take? It all came down to the bridges." He had not
contacted Bittrich "beforehand to warn him that I might have to
demolish the highway crossing. I presumed that it was Bittrich who had
ordered the bridges readied for demolition." So, Harmel reasoned, in
spite of Model's order, "if Bittrich had been in my shoes, he would
have blown the main bridge. In my opinion, Model's order was now
automatically canceled anyway." At any moment he expected tanks to
appear on the highway bridge.

Standing next to the engineer by the detonator box, Harmel scanned the
crossing. At first he could detect no movement. Then suddenly he saw
"a single tank reach the center, then a second behind and to its
right." To the engineer he said, "Get ready." Two more tanks appeared
in view, and Harmel waited for the line to reach the exact middle
before giving the order. He shouted, "Let it blow!" The engineer
jammed the plunger down. Nothing happened. The British tanks
continued to advance. Harmel yelled, "Again!" Once more the engineer
slammed down the detonator handle, but again the huge explosions that
Harmel had expected failed to occur. "I was waiting to see the bridge
collapse and the tanks plunge into the river," he recalled. "Instead,
they moved forward relentlessly, getting bigger and bigger, closer and
closer." He yelled to his anxious staff, "My God, they'll be here in
two minutes!"

Rapping out orders to his officers, Harmel told them "to block the
roads between Elst and Lent with every available antitank gun and
artillery piece because if we don't, they'll roll straight

through to Arnhem." Then, to his dismay he learned that the railroad
bridge was also still standing. Hurrying to a radio unit in one of the
nearby command posts, he contacted his advance headquarters and spoke
with his operations officer. "Stolley," Harmel said, "tell Bittrich.
They're over the Waal." * * This is the first account of the German
attempt to destroy the Nijmegen highway bridge. General Harmel had
never before given an interview to anyone on the subject. The failure
of the demolition charge remains a mystery to this day. Many Dutch
believe that the main crossing was saved by a young underground worker,
Jan van Hoof, who had been sent into Nijmegen on the nineteenth by the
82nd's Dutch liaison officer, Captain Arie Bestebreurtje, as a guide to
the paratroopers. Van Hoof is thought to have succeeded in penetrating
the German lines and to have reached the bridge, where he cut cables
leading to the explosives. He may well have done so. In 1949 a Dutch
commission investigating the story was satisfied that Van Hoof had cut
some lines, but could not confirm that these alone actually saved the
bridge. The charges and transmission lines were on the Lent side of
the Waal and Van Hoof's detractors maintain that it would have been
impossible for him to have reached them without being detected. The
controversy still rages. Although the evidence is against him,
personally I would like to believe that the young Dutchman, who was
shot by the Germans for his role in the underground during the battle,
was indeed responsible.

Sergeant Peter Robinson's four tanks pressed on across the bridge. A
second 88 had stopped firing, and Robinson "reckoned we had put it out
of operation, too." Looming ahead was a roadblock of heavy concrete
cubes with a gap of approximately ten feet in the middle. Robinson saw
Sergeant Pacey's tank make it through and stop on the far side. Then
Robinson got past and, as Pacey covered the three tanks, took the lead
once more. Robinson remembers that "visibility was terrible. I was
shouting like hell, trying to direct the gunner, the driver, and inform
headquarters all at the same time. The noise was unbelievable, with
all sorts of fire clanging off the girders." Three to four hundred
yards ahead on the right, alongside the roadbed, Robinson saw another
88. He shouted to the gunner: "Traverse right 400 yards and fire."
Guardsman Johnson blew the gun to pieces. As infantry around it began
to run, Johnson opened up with his machine gun. "It was a massacre,"
he recalled. "I didn't even have to bother looking through the
periscope. There were so many of them that I just

pulled the trigger." He could feel the tank "bumping over the bodies
lying in the road."

From the turret Robinson saw that his three tanks were still coming on
unharmed. He radioed to them to "close up and get a move on!" The
troop was now nearing the northern end of the bridge. Within seconds a
self-propelled gun began to fire. "There were two big bangs in front
of us," Robinson recalls. "My tin hat was blown off, but I wasn't
hit." Johnson fired off three or four shells. The gun and a nearby
house "burst into flame and the whole area was lit up like day."
Before he realized it, Robinson's tanks were across the bridge.

He ordered the gunners to cease fire, and as the dust cleared, he
caught sight of some figures in the ditch. At first he thought they
were German. Then "from the shape of their helmets I knew they were
Yanks. Suddenly there were Americans swarming all over the tank,
hugging and kissing me, even kissing the tank." Captain T. Moffatt
Burriss, his clothes still damp and blood-soaked from the shrapnel
wound he had received during the Waal crossing, grinned up at Johnson.
"You guys are the most beautiful sight I've seen in years," he said.
The huge, multi-spanned Nijmegen crossing, together with its approaches
almost a half mile long, had fallen intact. Of the Market-Garden
bridges, the last but one was now in Allied hands. The time was 7:15
P.m., September 20. Arnhem lay only eleven miles away.

Lieutenant Tony Jones of the Royal Engineers--a man whom General
Horrocks was later to describe as "the bravest of the brave"-- had
followed Robinson's troop across the bridge. Searching carefully for
demolitions, Jones worked so intently that he was unaware that Germans,
still on the girders, were shooting at him. In fact, he recalls, "I
don't ever remember seeing any." Near the roadblock in the center of
the bridge he found "six or eight wires coming over the railing and
lying on the footpath." Jones promptly cut the wires. Nearby he found
a dozen Teller mines

neatly stacked in a slit trench. He reasoned that "they were
presumably to be used to close the ten-foot gap in the roadblock, but
the Germans hadn't had the time to do it." Jones removed the
detonators and threw them into the river. At the bridge's northern end
he found the main explosive charges in one of the piers. He was
"staggered by the preparations for the German demolition job." The tin
demolition boxes, painted green to match the color of the bridge, "were
manufactured precisely to fit the girders they were attached to. Each
had a matching serial number, and altogether they were packed with
about five hundred pounds of TNT." The explosives were designed to be
fired electrically and the detonators were still in place and attached
to the wires Jones had just cut on the bridge. He could not understand
why the Germans had not destroyed the bridge unless the sudden smashing
Anglo-American drive had given them no time. With the detonators now
removed and all wires cut, the bridge was safe for vehicles and
tanks.

But the British armored task force that the Americans had expected
would move out immediately for Arnhem did not appear.

The link-up with the British 1/ Airborne at the farthest end of the
corridor weighed heavily on the minds of the Americans. Paratroopers
themselves, they felt a strong kinship with the men still fighting up
ahead. Cook's battalion had suffered brutally in crossing the Waal.
He had lost more than half of his two companies--134 men had been
killed, wounded or were missing--but the mission to capture the
Nijmegen bridges from both ends and open the road north had been
accomplished. Now, Cook's officers quickly pushed their units out into
a perimeter defense about the northern end of the highway bridge and
waited, expecting to see tanks race past them to relieve the British
paratroopers up ahead. But there was no further movement over the
bridge. Cook could not understand what was happening. He had expected
the tanks to "go like hell" toward Arnhem before light failed.

Captain Carl Kappel, commander of H Company, whose friend Colonel John
Frost was "somewhere up there," was on edge. His

men had also found and cut wires on the northern end. He was certain
that the bridge was safe. As he and Lieutenant La Riviere continued to
watch the empty bridge, Kappel said impatiently, "Perhaps we should
take a patrol and lead them over by the hand."

Second Lieutenant Ernest Murphy of Cook's battalion ran up to Sergeant
Peter Robinson, whose troops had crossed the bridge, and reported to
him that "we've cleared the area ahead for about a quarter of a mile.
Now it's up to you guys to carry on the attack to Arnhem." Robinson
wanted to go, but he had been told to "hold the road and the end of the
bridge at all costs." He had no orders to move out.

Colonel Tucker, the 504th regimental commander, was fuming at the
British delay. Tucker had supposed that a special task force would
make a dash up the road the moment the bridge was taken and cleared of
demolitions. The time to do it, he believed, "was right then, before
the Germans could recover their balance." As he later wrote, "We had
killed ourselves crossing the Waal to grab the north end of the bridge.
We just stood there, seething, as the British settled in for the
night, failing to take advantage of the situation. We couldn't
understand it. It simply wasn't the way we did things in the American
army--especially if it had been our guys hanging by their fingernails
eleven miles away. We'd have been going, rolling without stop. That's
what Georgie Patton would have done, whether it was daylight or
dark."

Lieutenant A. D. Demetras overheard Tucker arguing with a major from
the Guards Armored Division. "I think a most incredible decision was
being made right there on the spot," he recalls. From inside a small
bungalow being used as a command post, Demetras heard Tucker say
angrily, "Your boys are hurting up there at Arnhem. You'd better go.
It's only eleven miles." The major "told the Colonel that British
armor could not proceed until infantry came up," Demetras recalls.
"They were fighting the war by the book," Colonel Tucker said. "They
had "harbored" for the night. As usual, they stopped for tea."

Although his men were at less than half strength and almost

out of ammunition, Tucker thought of sending the 82nd troopers north
toward Arnhem on their own. Yet, he knew that General Gavin would
never have approved his action. The 82nd, strung out along its section
of the corridor, could not afford the manpower. But Gavin's sympathies
were with his men: the British should have driven ahead. As he was
later to put it, "there was no better soldier than the Corps commander,
General Browning. Still, he was a theorist. 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." * * Says General
Gavin, "I cannot tell you the anger and bitterness of my men. I found
Tucker at dawn so irate that he was almost unable to speak. There is
no soldier in the world that I admire more than the British, but
British infantry leaders somehow did not understand the camaraderie of
airborne troops. To our men there was only one objective: to save
their brother paratroopers in Arnhem. It was tragic. I knew Tucker
wanted to go, but I could never have allowed it. I had my hands full.
Besides, Tucker and my other line officers did not appreciate some of
the problems that the British had at that moment."

Despite their apparent casualness, the British officers--Browning,
Horrocks, Dempsey and Adair--were well aware of the urgency of moving
on. Yet, the problems were immense. Horrocks' corps was short of
gasoline and ammunition. He saw indications that his columns might be
pinched off south of Nijmegen at any moment. Fighting was still going
on in the center of the city, and Major General G. I. Thomas' 43rd
Wessex Division, far back in the column, had not even reached the
bridge at Grave, eight miles to the south. Cautious and methodical,
Thomas had not been able to keep pace with the British columns. The
Germans had cut the road at several points and Thomas' men had battled
fiercely to resecure it and drive back attacks. Although worried by
the viciousness of the German attacks that were now pressing on both
sides of the narrow corridor running to Nijmegen, General Browning
believed that Thomas could have moved faster. Horrocks was not so
sure. Concerned by the massive traffic jams along the road, he told
General Gavin, "Jim, never try to supply a corps up just one road."

Terrain--the difficulty Montgomery had foreseen and Model had counted
on--greatly influenced the tactical considerations

involved in moving on from the Nijmegen bridge. It was clear to
General Adair, commanding the Guards Armored Division, that the tanks
had reached the worst part of the Market-Garden corridor. The
dead-straight high-dike road ahead between Nijmegen and Arnhem looked
like an "island." "When I saw that island my heart sank," Adair later
recalled. "You can't imagine anything more unsuitable for tanks: steep
banks with ditches on each side that could be easily covered by German
guns." In spite of his misgivings Adair knew they would "have to have
a shot at it," but he had virtually no infantry and "to get along that
road was obviously first a job for infantry." Horrocks had reached the
same conclusion. The tanks would have to wait until infantry could
move up and pass through the Guards Armored columns. It would be
almost eighteen hours before a tank attack toward Arnhem could begin.

Yet the Corps commander, like the Americans, had held out hope for a
quick move up the corridor. Immediately upon the capture of the
Nijmegen crossing, believing that the northern end of the Arnhem bridge
was still in British hands, General Browning had informed Urquhart that
tanks were across. At two minutes to midnight, still optimistic about
an early start, Browning sent the following message:

202358 ... intention Guards Armored Division ... at first light to go
all-out for bridges at Arnhem ...

Some forty-five minutes later, learning of the delay in bringing up
infantry, Browning sent Urquhart a third message:

210045 ... tomorrow attack 1/ Airborne Division will be first priority
but do not expect another advance possibly before 1200 hours.

In Arnhem the "first priority" was far too late. The men of Colonel
John Frost's 2nd Battalion had already been enveloped by their tragic
fate. Three hours before Sergeant Robinson's troop had rattled across
the great Nijmegen span, the first three tanks under Major Hans Peter
Knaust's command had at last bludgeoned their way onto the Arnhem
bridge.

In the afternoon, as the first wave of Major Cook's paratroopers began
to cross the Waal, Captain Eric Mackay gave the order to evacuate the
Arnhem schoolhouse his men had held for more than sixty hours--since
evening on September 17. From seventy yards away a Tiger tank fired
shell after shell into the southern face of the building. "The house
was burning now," Mackay remembers, "and I heard my little stock of
explosives, which we had left upstairs, blow up." Of the thirteen men
still able to move about, each was down to just one clip of ammunition.
Hobbling about the cellar, Mackay decided that his troopers would
break out, fighting to the end.

He had no intention of leaving his wounded behind. With Lieutenant
Dennis Simpson leading the way, Mackay and two men acted as rear guard
as the paratroopers brought their casualties up from the cellar. While
Simpson covered them, the injured were moved into a side garden. "Then
just as Simpson moved toward the next house a mortar bombardment began
and I heard him shout, "Six more wounded." I knew," Mackay recalls,
"that we would be massacred--or the wounded would, at any rate--if we
tried to escape with them. I yelled to Simpson to surrender."

Collecting the remaining five men, each armed with a Bren gun, Mackay
headed east --the one direction, he believed, the Germans would not
expect him to take. His plan was to "lay low for the night and try to
make our way back west to join the main force." Mackay led his men
across the road, through ruined houses on the opposite side and onto
the next street. There, they

came face to face with two tanks accompanied by fifty or sixty
soldiers. Quickly moving line abreast, the six paratroopers riddled
the mass of startled Germans. "We had time for only a single magazine
apiece," Mackay recalls. "It was all over in two or three seconds.
The Germans just dropped like half-filled sacks of grain." As Mackay
shouted to his group to head for a nearby house, another man was killed
and a second wounded. Reaching temporary shelter, Mackay told the
three remaining men, "This fight is over." He suggested the troopers
move out individually. "With luck," he said, "we might all meet
together again by the bridge tonight."

One by one the men left. Ducking into a garden, Mackay crawled under a
rose bush. There he took off his badges of rank and threw them away.
"I figured I would sleep a bit," he recalls. "I had just shut my eyes
and reached that drowsy stage when I heard German voices. I tried to
breathe more softly and, with my charred and bloody clothes, I thought
I might look convincingly dead." Suddenly he received "a terrific kick
in the ribs." He took it limply, "like a newly dead corpse." Then he
"felt a bayonet go into my buttocks and lodge with a jar against my
pelvis." Strangely, Mackay recalls, "it didn't hurt, just shocked me a
bit when it hit the pelvis. It was when the bayonet came out that I
felt the pain." It triggered Mackay's anger. Pulling himself to his
feet, he drew his Colt. "What the bloody hell do you mean stabbing a
bayonet into a British officer?" he yelled. Unprepared for Mackay's
outburst, the Germans drew back and Mackay realized that he could have
"shot some of them if I had had any bullets. They couldn't shoot
back," he remembers, "because they were ringed all around me. They
would have hit one of their own. Their situation was so funny I
laughed." As the Germans stared at him, Mackay contemptuously threw
his Colt over a garden wall "so they couldn't get it as a souvenir."

Forcing Mackay to lean against a wall, the Germans began to search him.
His watch and an empty silver flask that had been his father's were
taken from him, but an escape map in his breast pocket was overlooked.
An officer returned the flask. When

Mackay asked about his watch he was told, "You won't need it where
you're going, and we're rather short on watches." Hands above his
head, he was marched off to a building where other British prisoners of
war were being held. Going from group to group Mackay reminded the men
that it was their duty to escape. Suddenly Mackay, the only officer
present, was taken into another room for interrogation. "I decided to
go on the offensive," he recalls. "There was a German lieutenant who
spoke perfect English, and I told him, firmly but politely, that it was
all over for the Germans and I was quite prepared to take their
surrender." The lieutenant stared at him in amazement but, Mackay
remembers, "that was the end of the interrogation."

Shortly before dusk the prisoners were herded out to trucks, which took
them east toward Germany. "They got a guard on the back, which made it
harder to try to get away," Mackay says, "but I told the lads to
scrunch up and crowd him so he couldn't use his gun." As the truck in
which he was riding slowed down at a bend in the road, Mackay jumped
off and tried to make his escape. "Unfortunately I had chosen the
worst possible place," he recalls. "I dropped within three feet of a
sentry. I jumped him and was trying to break his neck. Others arrived
just then and they beat me senseless." When he came to, Mackay found
himself crowded with other prisoners into a room in a small Dutch inn.
He managed to drag himself up to a sitting position against a wall and
then, for the first time in ninety hours, the young officer fell sound
asleep. * * The following day Mackay and three others escaped from the
German town of Emmerich. One of the men with him was Lieutenant Dennis
Simpson, who had led the breakout of the little group from the
schoolhouse. The four men made their way across country and reached
the Rhine. In a stolen boat they paddled all the way down to the
Allied lines at Nijmegen.

In the dusk around Colonel Frost's headquarters' building and alongside
the ramp, nearly a hundred men in small groups were still fighting
fiercely to hang on. The headquarters roof was burning and nearly
every man was down to his last few rounds of ammunition. Yet the
troopers seemed spirited as ever. Major

Freddie Gough believed that "even now, if we could just hold out a few
hours longer, we would be relieved."

At around 7 P.m. the 2nd Battalion's wounded commander awoke, annoyed
to find that he had slept at all. Frost heard "the gibbering of some
shell-shock cases" in the darkness of the cellar. The Germans were
still pounding the building and Frost became aware that the heat in the
cellar, now filled with over two hundred casualties, was intense.
Attempting to move, he felt a shock of pain run through his legs. He
asked that Gough be sent to him. "You'll have to take over," Frost
told the major, "but don't make any crucial decisions without first
referring them to me." By now Frost was becoming aware that what he
had most feared had begun to happen: the building was burning down and
the wounded were in danger "of being roasted alive." All over the dark
room men were coughing from the acrid smoke. Dr. James Logan, the
battalion's chief medical officer, knelt down beside Frost. The time
had come, Logan said, to get the casualties out. "We've got to arrange
a truce with the Germans, sir," Logan insisted. "We can't wait any
longer." Turning to Gough, Frost ordered him to make the arrangements,
"but to get the fighting soldiers to other buildings and carry on. I
felt that even though the bridge was lost we could still control the
approach for a time, perhaps enough time for our tanks to come."

Gough and Logan left to make arrangements for the truce. Logan
proposed to unbolt the heavy front doors of the building and go out
under a Red Cross flag. Gough was skeptical of the idea. He did not
trust the SS; they might well open fire in spite of the flag. Going
back to Frost, Logan received permission to proceed. As the doctor
headed toward the doors, Frost removed his badges of rank. He hoped to
"fade into the ranks and possibly get away later." Wicks, his batman,
went in search of a stretcher.

Nearby, Private James Sims, one of the wounded, glumly heard the
evacuation plans being made. Logically he knew there was no
alternative. "Our position was obviously hopeless," he recalls.
"Ammunition was all but exhausted, nearly all the officers and

NCO'S were dead or wounded, and the building was well alight; the smoke
was nearly choking everyone." He heard Frost tell the able-bodied and
the walking wounded "to get out and make a run for it." Sims knew it
was "the only sensible course, but the news that we were to be left
behind was not well received."

Upstairs Doctor Logan unlocked the front door. Accompanied by two
orderlies and carrying a Red Cross flag, Logan walked out to meet the
Germans. The noise of battle halted. "I saw some Germans run around
to the back where we had our jeeps and carriers parked," Gough
remembers. "They needed them to move the wounded, and I mentally waved
goodby to our remaining transport forever."

In the cellar men heard German voices in the passageways and Sims
noticed "the heavy thud of German jackboots on the stairway." The
cellar was suddenly quiet. Looking up Sims saw a German officer appear
in the doorway. To his horror, "a badly wounded paratrooper brought up
his Sten gun, but he was quickly overpowered. The officer," Sims
remembers, "took stock of the situation and rapped out some orders.
German soldiers filed in and began carrying the wounded upstairs."
They were almost too late. As Sims was being moved, "a huge piece of
burning timber nearly fell on top of us." He was acutely aware that
the Germans were "nervous, decidedly trigger-happy, and a lot of them
were armed with British rifles and Sten guns."

With the help of a shell-shocked paratrooper, Frost was carried up and
laid on the embankment beside the bridge he had so desperately tried to
hold. All about him he saw buildings burning fiercely. He watched as
Germans and British together "worked at top speed to get us out, while
the whole scene was brilliantly lit by the flames." Only minutes after
the last casualty was carried up, there was a sudden roar and the
building collapsed into a heap of fiery rubble. Turning to Major
Douglas Crawley, lying on a stretcher beside him, Frost said tiredly,
"Well, Doug, we didn't get away with it this time, did we?" Crawley
shook his head. "No, sir," he said, "but we gave them a damn good run
for their money."

As the British wounded watched in wary surprise, the Germans moved
among them with extraordinary camaraderie, handing out cigarettes,
chocolate and brandy. Bitterly, the paratroopers noticed that most of
the supplies were their own, obviously collected from resupply drops
that had fallen into German hands. As the hungry, thirsty men began to
eat, German soldiers knelt beside them, congratulating them on the
battle. Private Sims stared at a line of Mark IV tanks stretching back
along the road. Seeing his expression a German nodded. "Yes, Tommy,"
he told Sims, "those were for you in the morning if you had not
surrendered."

But Frost's stubborn able-bodied men had not given up. As the last
wounded man was brought out of the cellar the battle began again, as
intensely as an hour before. "It was a nightmare," Gough recalls.
"Everywhere you turned there were Germans --in front, in back and on
the sides. They had managed to infiltrate a large force into the area
during the truce. They now held practically every house. We were
literally overrun."

Gough ordered troopers to disperse and hide out for the night. At dawn
he hoped to concentrate the force in a group of half-gutted buildings
by the river bank. Even now he expected relief by morning, and "I
thought that somehow we could hold till then." As the men moved off
into the darkness, Gough crouched down beside his radio. Bringing the
microphone close to his mouth, he said, "This is the First Para
Brigade. We cannot hold out much longer. Our position is desperate.
Please hurry. Please hurry."

The Germans knew the fight was over. All that now remained was a
mopping-up operation. Ironically, although there were tanks on the
bridge, they could not cross. As General Harmel had predicted, the
massed wreckage would take hours to remove. Not until early Thursday,
September 21, would a single pathway be finally cleared and movement
across the bridge begin.

At first light on Thursday Gough and the scattered men remaining in the
perimeter emerged from their hiding places. Relief had not come.
Systematically the Germans overran positions,

forcing men now out of ammunition to surrender. By ones and twos,
survivors, undetected, scattered to attempt to make their escape.
Slowly, defiantly, the last British resistance came to an end.

Major Gough had headed for the waterworks, hoping to hide and rest for
a time and then attempt to make his way west toward the main body of
troops under Urquhart's command. Just outside the waterworks building
he heard German voices. Sprinting for a pile of wood, Gough tried to
burrow under it. The heel of his boot protruded and a German grasped
it and pulled Gough out. "I was so damn tired I just looked up at them
and laughed," Gough says. Hands over his head, he was led away.

In a roomful of other prisoners a German major sent for Gough. He gave
the British officer a Hitler salute. "I understand you are in
command," the German said. Gough looked at him warily. "Yes," he
said. "I wish to congratulate you and your men," the German told him.
"You are gallant soldiers. I fought at Stalingrad and it is obvious
that you British have had a great deal of experience in street
fighting." Gough stared at the enemy officer. "No," he said. "This
was our first effort. We'll be much better next time."

At some moment during these last hours one final message was radioed
from someone near the bridge. It was not picked up by either
Urquhart's headquarters or by the British Second Army, but at the 9th
SS Hohenstaufen headquarters Lieutenant Colonel Harzer's listening
monitors heard it clearly. Years later Harzer could not recall the
complete message, but he was struck by the last two sentences: "Out of
ammunition. God Save the King."

A few miles to the north near Apeldoorn, Private James Sims lay on the
grass outside a German military hospital, surrounded by other wounded
paratroopers awaiting processing and treatment. The men were quiet,
drawn into themselves. "The thought that we had fought for nothing was
a natural one," Sims wrote, "but I couldn't help but think about the
main army, so strong, and yet unable to make those last few miles to
us. The hardest thing to bear was the feeling that we had just been
written off."

At exactly 10:40 A.m. on Thursday, September 21, Captain Roland Langton
of the Irish Guards was told that his Number 1 Squadron was to dash out
of the newly acquired Nijmegen bridgehead and make for Arnhem. H Hour,
he was informed by Lieutenant Colonel Joe Vandeleur, would be 11 A.m.
Langton was incredulous. He thought Vandeleur must be joking. He was
being given just twenty minutes to brief his squadron and prepare them
for a major attack. Langton, himself, was quickly briefed on a
captured map. "The only other one we had was a road map devoid of
details," he says. Information about enemy gun positions was contained
in a single reconnaissance photo showing an antiaircraft site between
the villages of Lent and Elst, and "the supposition was that it might
no longer be there."

In Langton's view, everything about the plan was wrong--in particular,
the fact that "they were actually going to launch this thing in twenty
minutes." His squadron was to strike out with a second unit coming up
behind. Two tanks would carry infantry; and more troops, Langton was
told, would follow. Yet he could expect little artillery support, and
the Typhoon "cab rank" air cover, used so successfully in the initial
breakout, would not be immediately available: in Belgium the Typhoons
were grounded by weather. Nevertheless, Langton was instructed "to go
like hell and get on up to Arnhem."

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."

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.

On neat after-action report maps, each unit has its carefully inked-in
place; but survivors would recall years later that there was really no
perimeter, no front line, no distinction between units, no fighting as
integrated groups. There were only shocked, bandaged, bloodstained
men, running to fill gaps wherever and whenever they occurred. As
Brigadier Hicks visited his exhausted men, tenaciously defending their
sectors of the bridgehead, he knew "it was the beginning of the end,
and I think we were all aware of it, although we tried to keep a
reasonable face."

Unaware that Frost's gallant stand at the bridge had ended--although
Lieutenant Colonel Sheriff Thompson suspected it had when his artillery
radio link with Major Dennis Munford abruptly closed down--Urquhart
could only place his hope in the Guards tanks' reaching the remnants of
the 2nd Battalion in time. * That single bridge spanning the Rhine--
the Reich's last natural defense line--had been the principal objective
all along, Montgomery's springboard to a quick ending of the war.
Without it, the 1/ Airborne's predicament and, in particular, the
suffering of Frost's brave men, would be for nothing. As Urquhart had
told Frost and Gough, there was nothing more that he could do for them.
Their help must come from the speed and armored strength of XXX Corps.
* Munford destroyed his wireless set shortly after dawn on Thursday as
the Germans began rounding up the few men still attempting to hang on.
"Enemy tanks and infantry were right up to the bridge," Munford
recalls. "I helped carry some more wounded to a collecting point and
then I bashed in the set. There was nothing more that Colonel Thompson
could do for us and everybody who could wanted to get back to the
division at Oosterbeek." Munford was captured on the outskirts of
Arnhem as he tried to reach the British lines.

For Urquhart now the immediate priority was to get Sosabowski's Poles
across the river and into the perimeter as quickly as

they landed. The cable ferry was particularly suited to the operation.
Urquhart's engineers had signaled Corps headquarters that it was "a
class-24 type and capable of carrying three tanks." Although Urquhart
was worried about the heights of Westerbouwing and the possibility of
German artillery controlling the ferry crossing from there, as yet no
enemy troops had reached the area. With so few men to hold the
perimeter, only a single platoon of the 1/ Borderers had been detached
to defend the position. In fact, the heights were unguarded by either
side. Major Charles Osborne's D Company of the Border Regiment had
been given the assignment soon after landing on Sunday but, Osborne
says, "we never did hold Westerbouwing. I was sent on a reconnaissance
patrol to lay out battalion positions. However, by the time I'd done
this and returned to headquarters, plans had changed." By Thursday,
Osborne's men "were moved rather piecemeal into a position near the
Hartenstein Hotel." No one was on the vital heights.

On Wednesday engineers had sent reconnaissance patrols down to the
Rhine to report back on the ferry, the depth, condition of the banks
and speed of the current. Sapper Tom Hicks thought the survey was to
"aid the Second Army when it tried bridging the river." Along with
three other sappers and a Dutch guide, Hicks had crossed the Rhine on
the ferry. Pieter, he saw, "operated it with a cable that the old man
wound in by hand and it seemed that the current helped work it across."
Tying a grenade to a length of parachute rigging and knotting the cord
every foot along its length, Hicks took soundings and measured the
current. On Wednesday night, after the Poles' drop zone had been
changed to Driel, another patrol was sent to the ferry site. "It was a
volunteer job," recalls Private Robert Edwards of the South
Staffordshires. "We were to go down to the river at Heveadorp, find
the ferry and stay there to protect it."

In darkness a Sergeant, a corporal, six privates and four glider pilots
set out. "Mortar bombs and shells were falling heavily as we plunged
into the thickly wooded country between us and Heveadorp," says
Edwards. Several times the group was fired on,

and a glider pilot was wounded. Reaching the riverbank at the site
marked on their maps, the patrol found no sign of the ferry. It had
completely disappeared. Although the possibility remained that the
craft was moored on the southern bank, the patrol had been told they
would find it on their own side. Immediately the men spread out,
searching along a quarter-mile strip on either side of the ferry's
northern landing stage. The hunt was fruitless. Pieter's ferry could
not be found. As Edwards remembers, the sergeant in charge of the
patrol reached the conclusion that the boat had either been sunk or
simply never existed. At first light the men gave up the search and
began their dangerous journey back.

Only minutes later heavy machine-gun fire wounded three more of the
patrol and the group was pulled back to the river. There the sergeant
decided the men would have a better chance of getting back by splitting
up. Edwards left with the corporal and two of the glider pilots.
After "minor encounters and brushes with the Germans," his group
reached the church in lower Oosterbeek just as a mortar burst landed.
Edwards was thrown to the ground, both legs filled with "tiny pieces of
shrapnel and my boots full of blood." In the house next to the church
an orderly dressed his wounds and told the injured private to take a
rest. "He didn't say where, though," Edwards recalls, "and every inch
of space in the house was packed with badly wounded. The stench of
wounds and death was something awful." He decided to leave and head
for company headquarters, located in a laundry, "in order to find
somebody to make my report to. I told an officer about the ferry and
then I got into a weapons pit with a glider pilot. I don't know if the
others made it back or what happened to the men who got to the church
with me."

Sometime later General Urquhart, still ignorant of Frost's fate,
signaled Browning:

Enemy attacking main bridge in strength. Situation critical for
slender force. Enemy attacking east from Heelsum and west from
Arnhem.

Situation serious but am forming close perimeter around Hartenstein
with remainder of division. Relief essential both areas earliest
possible. Still maintain control ferry point at Heveadorp.

Even as the message was being sent via the 64th Medium Regiment's
communications net, Division headquarters learned that the ferry had
not been found. Urquhart's officers believed the Germans had sunk it.
But Pieter's ferry was still afloat. Presumably artillery fire had cut
its moorings. Far too late to be of use, it was eventually found by
Dutch civilians near the demolished railroad bridge about a mile away,
washed up but still intact. "If we had been able to search a few
hundred yards closer to Oosterbeek, we would have found it," Edwards
says.

As Urquhart returned to his headquarters on Thursday morning after an
inspection of the Hartenstein defenses, he heard the crushing news.
With the Poles' drop only hours away, his only quick way of reinforcing
the perimeter with Sosabowski's men was gone. * * The true account of
the ferry appears here for the first time. Even official histories
state that it was sunk. Other versions imply that, to prevent its use,
the Germans either destroyed the ferry with artillery fire or moved it
to another location under their control. There is no reference in any
German war diary, log, or after-action report to sustain these
conjectures. Interviewing German officers--such as Bittrich, Harzer,
Harmel and Krafft-- I found that none of them could recall ordering any
such action. Assuming that the Germans wanted to seize the ferry, I
believe they would have encountered the same difficulties in locating
it that Edwards reported. In any case, no German officer remembers
ordering the cable cut in order to prevent the British from using it.

Looking down from a window in the lead Dakota, as the long columns of
planes carrying the Polish 1/ Parachute Brigade headed for the drop
zone at Driel, Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski "learned the real
truth, and what I had suspected all along." From Eindhoven, where the
formations turned north, he saw "hundreds of vehicles below in chaotic
traffic jams all along the corridor." Smoke churned up from the road.
At various points along the highway enemy shells were landing, trucks
and vehicles were ablaze, and "everywhere wreckage was piled up on
the

sides." Yet, somehow, the convoys were still moving. Then, beyond
Nijmegen, movement stopped. Through low clouds off to his right,
Sosabowski could see the "island" road and the clogged, halted tanks on
it. Enemy fire was falling on the head of the column. Moments later,
as the planes banked toward Driel, the Arnhem bridge loomed into view.
Tanks were crossing over it, driving north to south, and Sosabowski
realized they were German. Shocked and stunned, he knew now that the
British had lost the bridge.

On Wednesday night, agitated by the lack of information regarding
Urquhart's situation, and "as I had visions of being court-martialed by
my own government," Sosabowski had thrown caution to the winds. He
demanded to see General Brereton, the First Allied Airborne Army
commander. To Colonel George Stevens, the liaison officer with the
Polish Brigade, Sosabowski had emotionally insisted that unless he was
"given Urquhart's exact situation around Arnhem, the Polish Parachute
Brigade will not take off." Startled, Stevens had rushed off to First
Allied Airborne headquarters with Sosabowski's ultimatum. At 7 A.m. on
Thursday morning, he returned with news from Brereton. There was
confusion, Stevens admitted, but the attack was going as planned; the
drop zone at Driel had not been changed and "the Heveadorp ferry was in
British hands." Sosabowski was mollified. Now, looking down on the
panorama of battle, he realized he "knew more than Brereton." Enraged
as he saw what was obviously German armor about Oosterbeek and ahead a
hail of antiaircraft fire coming up to greet his men, Sosabowski
believed his brigade was "being sacrificed in a complete British
disaster." Moments later he was out the door, falling through weaving
curtains of antiaircraft fire. The time, the precise fifty-year-old
general noted, was exactly 5:08 P.m.

As Sosabowski had feared, the Poles jumped into a holocaust. As
before, the Germans were waiting. They had tracked and timed the
formations from Dunkirk on and now, with far more reinforcements than
before, the area bristled with antiaircraft guns. As the transports
approached, twenty-five Messerschmitts

suddenly appeared and, diving out of the clouds, raked the approaching
planes.

As he fell through the air Sosabowski saw one Dakota, both engines
flaming, fall toward the ground. Corporal Alexander Kochalski saw
another go down. Only a dozen paratroopers escaped before it crashed
and burned. First Lieutenant Stefan Kaczmarek prayed as he hung below
his chute. He saw so many tracer bullets that "every gun on the ground
seemed to be aimed at me." Corporal Wladijslaw Korob, his parachute
full of holes, landed alongside a fellow Pole who had been
decapitated.

In the Oosterbeek perimeter the Polish drop, barely two and one-half
miles away, caused a momentary halt in the battle. Every German gun
seemed to be concentrating on the swaying, defenseless men. "It was as
if all the enemy guns lifted together and let fly simultaneously,"
Gunner Robert Christie noted. The reprieve from the constant shelling
was too precious to waste: men quickly took the opportunity to move
jeeps and equipment, dig new gun pits, bring up spare ammunition,
rearrange camouflage nets and toss empty shell cases out of crowded
slit trenches.

Six miles away on the elevated "island" road, Captain Roland Langton,
whose lead tank squadron had been halted en route to Arnhem some six
hours previously, watched the drop in agony. It was the most horrible
sight he had ever seen. German planes dived at the defenseless Polish
transports, "blasting them out of the air." Parachutists tried to get
out of burning aircraft, "some of which had nosed over and were diving
to the ground." Bodies of men "tumbled through the air, inert forms
drifting slowly down, dead before they hit the ground." Langton was
close to tears. "Where the hell is the air support?" he wondered.
"We were told in the afternoon we couldn't have any for our attack
toward Arnhem, because all available air effort had to go for the
Poles. Where was it now? The weather? Nonsense. The Germans flew;
why couldn't we?" Langton had never felt so frustrated. With all his
heart, he knew that with air support his tanks "could have got through
to those poor bastards at Arnhem." In anxiety and desperation he
suddenly found himself violently sick.

Though they were shocked by the savagery of the combined air and
antiaircraft assault, most of the Polish Brigade miraculously made the
drop zone. Even as they landed, flak and high-explosive mortar
shells--fired from tanks and antiaircraft guns along the
Nijmegen-Arnhem elevated highway and by batteries north of Driel--burst
among them, and Sosabowski saw that even machine guns seemed to be
ranged in on the entire area. Hammered in the air and caught in a
deadly crossfire on the ground, the men now had to fight their way off
the drop zones. Sosabowski landed near a canal. As he ran for cover
he came across the body of one trooper. "He lay on the grass,
stretched out as if on a cross," Sosabowski later wrote. "A bullet or
piece of shrapnel had neatly sliced off the top of his head. I
wondered how many more of my men would I see like this before the
battle was over and whether their sacrifice would be worthwhile." * *
Stanislaw Sosabowski, Freely I Served, p. 124.

Aghast at the fierce German reception, the entire population of Driel
was engulfed by the paratroop drop. Polish troopers came down all
about the hamlet, landing in orchards, irrigation canals, on the top of
the dikes, on the polder and in the village itself. Some men fell into
the Rhine and, unable to shed their parachutes, were swept away and
drowned. Disregarding the shell and machine-gun fire all about them,
the Dutch ran to help the ill-fated Poles. Among them, as a member of
a Red Cross team, was Cora Baltussen.

The landing, centered on drop zones less than two miles south of Driel,
had come as a complete surprise to the villagers. No pathfinders had
been used, and the Dutch underground was ignorant of the plan. Riding
a bicycle with wooden tires, Cora Baltussen headed south on a narrow
dike road toward a place known as Honingsveld, where many of the
paratroopers appeared to have landed. Shocked and terrified, she did
not see how anyone could have lived through the German fire. She
expected enormous numbers of casualties. To her surprise, Cora saw
men, under attack, forming up and running in groups toward the safety
of dike embankments. She could hardly believe so many were still

alive but "at last," she thought, "the Tommies have arrived in
Driel."

She had not spoken English in years, but Cora was the only inhabitant
of Driel familiar with the language. While her services as a trained
Red Cross nurse would be required, Cora also hoped to act as an
interpreter. Hurrying forward, she saw men waving wildly at her,
obviously "warning me to get off the road because of the fire." But in
her "excitement and foolishness," Cora was unaware of the fusillade of
enemy steel storming all about her. Shouting "Hello Tommies" to the
first group she encountered, she was nonplused by their reply. These
men spoke another language--not English. For a moment she listened. A
number of Poles, impressed into the German Army, had been stationed in
Driel some years before. Almost immediately she recognized the
language as Polish. This puzzled her still more.

After years of living under enemy occupation, Cora was wary. Hiding in
the Baltussen factory at this moment were several British troopers and
the crew of a downed plane. The Poles seemed equally suspicious, as
they eyed her carefully. They spoke no Dutch, but some men ventured
guarded questions in broken English or German. Where, they asked, had
she come from? How many people were in Driel? were there any Germans
in the village? Where was Baarskamp farm? The mention of Baarskamp
brought a torrent of words in both German and English from Cora. The
farm lay slightly east of the village and, although Cora was not a
member of the tiny underground force in Driel, she had heard her
brother, Josephus, an active member, refer to the owner of the farm as
a Dutch Nazi. She knew there were some German troops around Baarskamp,
along the Rhine dike road, and manning antiaircraft gun sites in the
brickworks along the riverbank. "Don't go there," she pleaded.
"German troops are all about the place." The Poles seemed unconvinced.
"They were not sure whether to trust me or not," Cora recalls. "I did
not know what to do. Yet I was desperately afraid these men would set
out for Baarskamp and into some sort of a trap." Among the group
around her was General Sosabowski. "As he wore no distinctive

markings and looked like all the others," Cora remembers, "it was not
until the next day that I learned that the short, wiry little man was
the general." Sosabowski, she remembers, was calmly eating an apple.
He was intensely interested in her information about Baarskamp farm; by
sheer accident it had been chosen as the main rendezvous point for his
brigade. Although Cora thought that no one in the group believed her,
Sosabowski's officers now immediately sent off runners to inform other
groups about Baarskamp. The compact little man with the apple now
asked, "Where is the ferry site?"

One of the officers produced a map, and Cora pointed out the location.
"But," she informed them, "it is not running." The people of Driel had
not seen the tender since Wednesday. They had learned from Pieter that
the cable had been cut, and they presumed that the ferry had been
destroyed.

Sosabowski listened with dismay. On landing, he had sent out a
reconnaissance patrol to locate the site. Now his fear had been
confirmed. "I still waited for the patrol's report," he recalled, "but
this young woman's information seemed accurate. I thanked her warmly."
* A formidable task now lay before him. To send help quickly to
Urquhart's beleaguered men in the perimeter, Sosabowski would have to
put his force across the 400-yard-wide Rhine by boat or raft--and in
darkness. He did not know whether Urquhart's engineers had found
boats, or where he might find enough himself. His radiomen, Sosabowski
learned, were unable to raise British 1/ Airborne headquarters. He was
ignorant of any new plans that might have been formulated. * Some
accounts claim that Cora was a member of the underground and was sent
to inform Sosabowski that the ferry was in German hands. "Nothing
could be further from the truth," says Cora. "I was never a member of
the resistance, though my brothers were involved. The British did not
trust the underground and certainly we in Driel knew nothing about the
drop until the Poles were right on us."

Now, as Cora and her team set out to help the wounded, Sosabowski
watched his men move up under the cover of smoke bombs, overrunning
what little opposition there was in the area. So far, the only major
resistance his brigade had encountered came from artillery shells and
mortars. As yet no armor had

appeared. The soft polder seemed inadequate for tanks. Perplexed and
grim, Sosabowski set up brigade headquarters in a farmhouse and waited
for news from Urquhart. His mood was not improved when he learned that
of his 1,500-man brigade, 500 troops had failed to arrive. Bad weather
had forced the planes carrying almost one entire battalion to abort and
return to their bases in England. In casualties, his remaining force
had already paid a cruel price: although he did not have the exact
figures, by nightfall only about 750 men had been assembled, among them
scores of wounded.

At 9 P.m. news arrived, rather dramatically, from Urquhart. Unable to
raise Sosabowski by radio, the Polish liaison officer at Urquhart's
headquarters, Captain Zwolanski, swam across the Rhine. "I was working
on a map," Sosabowski remembered, "and suddenly this incredible figure,
dripping with water and covered with mud, clad in undershorts and
camouflaged netting, came in."

Zwolanski told the General that Uruquhart "wanted us to cross that
night and he would have rafts ready to ferry us over." Sosabowski
immediately ordered some of his men up to the river line to wait. They
remained there most of the night, but the rafts did not come. "At 3
A.m.," says Sosabowski, "I knew the scheme, for some reason, had
failed. I pulled my men back into a defensive perimeter." By dawn he
expected "German infantry attacks and heavy artillery fire." Any
chance of getting across the Rhine "under cover of darkness this night
was gone."

At the Hartenstein Hotel across the river, Urquhart had earlier sent an
urgent message to Browning. It read:

(212144) No knowledge of elements of division in Arnhem for 24 hours.
Balance of division in very tight perimeter. Heavy mortaring and
machine-gun fire followed by local attacks. Main nuisance
self-propelled guns. Our casualties heavy. Resources stretched to
utmost. Relief within 24 hours vital.

At his small post in Brussels, near Montgomery's 21/ Army Group
headquarters, Prince Bernhard, Commander in Chief of the Netherlands
Forces, followed each harrowing new development with anguish. Holland,
which might have been liberated with ease in the first days of
September, was being turned into a vast battlefield. Bernhard blamed
no one. American and British fighting men were giving their lives to
rid the Netherlands of a cruel oppressor. Still, Bernhard had rapidly
become disenchanted with Montgomery and his staff. By Friday,
September 22, when Bernhard learned that the Guards Armored tanks had
been stopped at Elst and the Poles dropped near Driel rather than on
the southern side of the Arnhem bridge, the thirty-three-year-old
Prince lost his temper. "Why?" he angrily demanded of his chief of
staff, Major General "Pete" Doorman. "Why wouldn't the British listen
to us? Why?"

Senior Dutch military advisers had been excluded from the planning for
Market-Garden; their counsel might have been invaluable. "For
example," Bernhard recalls, "if we had known in time about the choice
of drop zones and the distance between them and the Arnhem bridge, my
people would certainly have said something." Because of "Montgomery's
vast experience," Bernhard and his staff "had questioned nothing and
accepted everything." But, from the moment Dutch generals learned of
the route that Horrocks' XXX Corps columns proposed to take, they had
anxiously tried to dissuade anyone who would listen, warning of the
dangers of using exposed dike roads. "In our military staff colleges,"
Bernhard Says, "we had run countless studies on the problem. We knew
tanks simply could not operate along these roads without infantry."
Again and again Dutch officers had told Montgomery's staff that the
Market-Garden schedule could not be maintained unless infantry
accompanied the tanks. General Doorman described how he had
"personally held trials with armor in that precise area before the
war."

The British, Bernhard says, "were simply not impressed by our negative
attitude." Although everyone was "exceptionally polite, the British
preferred to do their own planning, and our views

were turned down. The prevailing attitude was, "Don't worry, old boy,
we'll get this thing cracking."" Even now, Bernhard noted, "everything
was being blamed on the weather. The general impression among my staff
was that the British considered us a bunch of idiots for daring to
question their military tactics." With the exception of a few senior
officers, Bernhard knew that he was "not particularly loved at
Montgomery's headquarters, because I was saying things that now
unfortunately were turning out to be true--and the average Englishman
doesn't like being told by a bloody foreigner that he's wrong." * *
Lieutenant Rupert Mahaffey of the Irish Guards remembers that an
officer of the Dutch Princess Irene Brigade came to the Guards' mess
for dinner shortly after the tanks were stopped at Elst. Looking
around the table, the Dutch officer said, "You would have failed the
examination." He explained that one of the problems in the Dutch Staff
College examination dealt solely with the correct way to attack Arnhem
from Nijmegen. There were two choices: a) attack up the main road; or
but) drive up it for 1-2 miles, turn left, effect a crossing of the
Rhine and come around in a flanking movement. "Those who chose to go
straight up the road failed the examination," the officer said. "Those
who turned left and then moved up to the river, passed."

From his Brussels headquarters Bernhard had kept the
sixty-four-year-old Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government in exile
in London fully informed of events. "They could not have influenced
British military decisions either," Bernhard says. "It would have done
no good for the Queen or our government to take the matter up with
Churchill. He would never have interfered with a military operation in
the field. Monty's reputation was too big. There wasn't anything we
could really do."

Queen Wilhelmina followed the battle anxiously. Like her son-in-law,
she had expected a quick liberation of the Netherlands. Now, if
Market-Garden failed, the royal family feared "the terrible reprisals
the Germans would exact from our people. The Queen expected no
sympathy from the Germans, whom she hated with a passion."

In the early progress of the operation, Bernhard had informed
Wilhelmina that "soon we will be overrunning some of the royal castles
and estates." The Queen replied, "Burn them all." Startled, Bernhard
stammered, "I beg your pardon?" Wilhelmina said, "I will never again
set foot in a place where the Germans have been

sitting in my chairs, in my rooms. Never!" Bernhard attempted to
mollify her. "Mother, you are exaggerating things a bit. After all,
they are quite useful buildings. We can steam them out, use DDT." The
Queen was adamant. "Burn the palaces down," she commanded. "I will
never set foot in one of them." The Prince refused. "The Queen was
angry because I occupied the palace with my staff (without destroying
it) and not asking her first. She didn't talk to me for weeks, except
on official matters."

Now Bernhard and his staff could only "wait and hope. We were bitter
and frustrated at the turn of events. It had never entered our minds
that costly mistakes could be made at the top." The fate of Holland
itself made Bernhard even more apprehensive. "If the British were
driven back at Arnhem, I knew the repercussions against the Dutch
people in the winter ahead would be frightful."

Oosterbeek, the quiet island in the midst of the war, was now the very
center of the fighting. In less than seventy-two hours--from Wednesday
on--the village had been pounded to a shambles. Artillery and mortar
fire had reduced it to one vast junk heap. The serene order of the
town was gone. In its place was a ravaged raw landscape, pitted with
shell craters, scarred by slit trenches, littered with splinters of
wood and steel, and thick with red brick dust and ashes. From
fire-blackened trees, fragments of cloth and curtains blew eerily in
the wind. Spent brass cartridge cases glinted in the ankle-high dust
along the streets. Roads were barricaded with burned-out jeeps and
vehicles, trees, doors, sandbags,

furniture--even bathtubs and pianos. Behind half-demolished houses and
sheds, by the sides of streets and in ruined gardens lay the bodies of
soldiers and civilians, side by side. Resort hotels, now turned into
hospitals, stood among lawns littered with furniture, paintings and
smashed lamps; and the gaily striped canopies, which had shaded the
wide verandas, hung down in soiled, ragged strips. Nearly every house
had been hit; some had burned down; and there were few windows left in
the town. In this sea of devastation, which the Germans were now
calling Der Hexenkessel (the witches' cauldron), the Dutch--some eight
to ten thousand men, women and children --struggled to survive.
Crowded into cellars, without gas, water or electricity and, like the
troops in many sectors, almost without food, the civilians nursed their
wounded, the British defenders and, when the occasion arose, their
German conquerors.

In the Schoonoord Hotel, now one of the main casualty stations sitting
squarely on the front line, Hendrika van der Vlist, the daughter of the
owner, noted in her diary:

We are no longer afraid; we are past all that. There are wounded lying
all around us--some of them are dying. Why shouldn't we do the same if
this is asked of us? In this short time we have become detached from
everything we have always clung to before. Our belongings are gone.
Our hotel has been damaged on all sides. We don't even give it a
thought. We have no time for that. If this strife is to claim us as
well as the British, we shall give ourselves.

Along lanes, in fields and on rooftops, behind barricaded windows in
the ruins of houses, near the church in lower Oosterbeek, in the deer
park about the wrecked Hartenstein, tense, hollow-eyed paratroopers
manned positions. The noise of the bombardment was now almost
continuous. Soldiers and civilians alike were deafened by it. In
Oosterbeek the British and Dutch were shocked into a kind of numbness.
Time had little meaning, and events had become blurred. Yet soldiers
and civilians helped to comfort each other, hoping for rescue, but
almost too exhausted to worry about survival. Lieutenant Colonel R.
Payton-Reid,

commander of the 7th KOSB'S, noted: "Lack of sleep is the most
difficult of all hardships to combat. Men reached the stage when the
only important thing in life seemed to be sleep." As Captain Benjamin
Clegg of the ioth Parachute Battalion put it, "I remember more than
anything the tiredness--almost to the point that being killed would be
worth it." And Sergeant Lawrence Goldthorpe, a glider pilot, was so
worn out that "I sometimes wished I could get wounded in order to lie
down and get some rest." But there was no rest for anyone.

All about the perimeter--from the white Dreyeroord Hotel (known to the
troops as the "White House") in the northern extremity of the
fingertip-shaped salient, down to the tenth-century church in lower
Oosterbeek--men fought a fiercely confused kind of battle in which the
equipment and forces of defender and attacker were crazily
intermingled. British troopers often found themselves using captured
German ammunition and weapons. German tanks were being destroyed by
their own mines. The Germans were driving British jeeps and were
bolstered by the captured supplies intended for the airborne. "It was
the cheapest battle we ever fought," Colonel Harzer, the Hohenstaufen
commander, recalls. "We had free food, cigarettes and ammunition."
Both sides captured and recaptured each other's positions so often that
few men knew with certainty from hour to hour who occupied the site
next to them. For the Dutch sheltering in cellars along the perimeter,
the constant switching was terrifying.

Jan Voskuil, the chemical engineer, moved his entire family--his
parents-in-law, his wife, Bertha, and their nine-year-old son,
Henri--to the home of Dr. Onderwater, because the doctor's reinforced
sand-bagged cellar seemed safer. At the height of one period of
incessant shooting, a British antitank team fought from the floor above
them. Minutes later the cellar door burst open and an SS officer,
accompanied by several of his men, demanded to know if the group was
hiding any British. Young Henri was playing with a shell case from a
British fighter's wing gun. The German officer held up the casing.
"This is from a British gun," he

shouted. "Everyone upstairs!" Voskuil was quite sure that the
cellar's occupants would all be shot. Quickly he intervened. "Look,"
he told the officer, "this is a shell from an English plane. My son
found it and has simply been playing with it." Abruptly the German
motioned to his men and the group moved to the upper floor, leaving the
Dutch unharmed. Some time later, the cellar door burst open again. To
everyone's relief, British paratroopers entered, looking, Voskuil
thought, "unearthly, with their camouflage jackets and helmets still
sprouting twigs. Like St. Nicholas they handed around chocolates and
cigarettes which they had just captured from a German supply truck."

Private Alfred Jones, of Major Boy Wilson's pathfinders, was also
caught up in the confusion of battle. Holding positions in a house at
the crossroads near the Schoonoord Hotel, Jones and other members of a
platoon saw a German staff car approach. The bewildered troopers
stared as the car pulled up at the house next to them. "We watched
openmouthed," Jones remembers, "as the driver opened the door for the
officer and gave the Hitler salute and the officer made for the house."
Then, Jones recalls, "we all woke up, the platoon opened fire, and we
got them both."

Some brushes with the enemy were less impersonal. Leading a fighting
patrol through dense undergrowth on the northern shoulder of the
perimeter near the Dennenkamp crossroads, Lieutenant Michael Long of
the Glider Pilot Regiment came face to face with a young German. He
was carrying a Schmeisser sub-machine gun; Long had a revolver.
Yelling to his men to scatter, the lieutenant opened fire, but the
German was faster "by a split second." Long was hit in the thigh and
fell to the ground; the German was "only nicked in the right ear." To
Long's horror the German tossed a grenade "which landed about eighteen
inches from me." Frantically Long kicked the "potato masher" away. It
exploded harmlessly. "He searched me," Long remembers, "took two
grenades from my pockets and threw them into the woods after my men.
Then he calmly sat on my chest and opened fire with the Schmeisser."
As the German sprayed the undergrowth, the hot shell cases dropped down
into the open neck of Long's

battle dress. Irate, Long nudged the German and, pointing at the shell
cases, yelled, "Sehr warm." Still firing, the German said, "Oh, ja!"
and shifted his position so that the spent ammunition fell on the
ground. After a few moments the German ceased firing and again
searched Long. He was about to throw away the lieutenant's first-aid
kit, when Long pointed to his thigh. The German pointed to his ear
which Long's bullet had grazed. In the undergrowth, with firing going
on all around them, the two men bandaged each other's wounds. Then
Long was led away into captivity.

Slowly but surely the perimeter was being squeezed as men were killed,
wounded or taken prisoner. Staff Sergeant George Baylis, the glider
pilot who had brought his dancing pumps to Holland because he believed
the Dutch loved to dance, was "winkled out" of a camouflaged slit
trench in a garden by German soldiers. Lined up against a wall, Baylis
was searched and interrogated. Ignoring his questioner, Baylis calmly
took out a hand mirror and examining his grimy, unshaven face, asked
the German, "You don't happen to know if there's a dance in town
tonight, do you?" He was marched off.

Other paratroopers actually did hear dance music. From German
loudspeakers came one of World War II'S popular songs, Glenn Miller's
"In the Mood." In trenches and fortified positions, haggard troopers
listened silently. As the record ended, a voice speaking English told
them, "Men of the First Airborne Division, you are surrounded.
Surrender or die!" Sergeant Leonard Overton of the Glider Pilot
Regiment "fully expected now not to leave Holland alive anyway."
Overton and everyone nearby answered with machine-gun fire. Sergeant
Lawrence Goldthorpe heard the loudspeaker, too. A few hours earlier he
had risked his life to retrieve a resupply pannier--only to discover
that it contained, not food or ammunition, but red berets. Now, when
he heard the call to "Give yourselves up, while you still have time,"
he yelled: "Bugger off, you silly bastards!" As he lifted his rifle he
heard other men in woods and trenches take up the cry. There was a
blaze of machine-gun and rifle fire as enraged troopers trained

their guns in the direction of the loudspeaker. Abruptly the voice
stopped.

To the Germans, surrender seemed the only sensible course left to the
British--as Major Richard Stewart of the 1/ Airlanding Brigade
discovered. Stewart, captured and found to speak German fluently, was
taken to a large headquarters. He remembers the commanding officer
vividly. General Bittrich "was a tall, slender man, probably in his
early or middle forties, wearing a long black leather coat and cap,"
Stewart recalls. Bittrich did not interrogate him. "He simply told me
that he wanted me to go to my division commander and persuade him to
surrender to save the division from annihilation." Stewart politely
refused. The General went into "a long dissertation. He told me it
was in my power to save the "flowering manhood of the nation."" Again,
Stewart said, "I cannot do it." Bittrich urged him once more. Stewart
asked, "Sir, if our places were reversed, what would your answer be?"
The German commander slowly shook his head. "My answer would be No."
Stewart said, "That's mine too."

Although Bittrich "had never seen men fight as hard as the British at
Oosterbeek and Arnhem," he continued to underestimate the determination
of Urquhart's troopers, and he wrongly interpreted the Polish drop at
Driel. While he considered the arrival of the Poles "a morale booster"
for the embattled 1/ British Airborne, Bittrich believed Sosabowski's
principal task was to attack the German rear and prevent Harmel's
Frundsberg Division, now using the Arnhem bridge, from reaching the
Nijmegen area. He considered the Polish threat so serious that he
"intervened in the operations against Oosterbeek" and ordered Major
Hans Peter Knaust to rush his armored battalion south. The powerful
Knaust Kampfgruppe, now reinforced with twenty-five 60-ton Tiger tanks
and twenty Panthers, was to defend Elst and prevent the Poles from
reaching the southern end of the Arnhem bridge and Horrocks' tanks from
linking up with them. Harmel's Frundsberg Division, after it reformed,
was ordered "to throw the Anglo-Americans in the Nijmegen area back
across the Waal." To Bittrich, the British drive from Nijmegen was
of

utmost importance. Urquhart's division, Bittrich believed, was
contained and finished. He had never considered that the Poles'
objective was to reinforce Urquhart's bridgehead. Nevertheless,
Bittrich's strategy--developed for the wrong reasons--would seal the
fate of the 1/ Airborne Division.

Early in the morning of Friday, September 22, as the last of Knaust's
tanks arrived at Elst, General Urquhart heard from Horrocks, the XXX
Corps commander. In two Phantom messages sent during the night
Urquhart had informed British Second Army headquarters that the ferry
was no longer held. Horrocks apparently had not been informed. The
Corps commander's message read: "43rd Division ordered to take all
risks to effect relief today and are directed on ferry. If situation
warrants you should withdraw to or cross ferry." Urquhart replied, "We
shall be glad to see you."

In the wine cellar of the wrecked Hartenstein Hotel--"the only place
remaining that was relatively safe," Urquhart recalls--the General
conferred with his chief of staff, Colonel Charles Mackenzie. "The
last thing we wanted to be was alarmist," Urquhart remembers, "but I
felt I had to do something to effect relief--and effect it
immediately."

Outside, the "morning hate," as the troopers called the usual dawn
mortaring, had begun. The shattered Hartenstein shook and reverberated
from the concussion of near hits, and the harried Urquhart wondered how
long they could hold. Of the 10,005 airborne troops--8,905 from the
division and 1,100 glider pilots and copilots--that had landed on the
Arnhem drop zones, Urquhart now estimated that he had fewer than 3,000
men. In slightly less than five days he had lost more than two thirds
of his division. Although he now had communication with Horrocks and
Browning, Urquhart did not believe they understood what was happening.
"I was convinced," Urquhart says, "that Horrocks was not fully aware of
our predicament, and I had to do something to acquaint them with the
urgency and desperateness of the situation." He decided to send
Colonel Mackenzie and Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Myers, the chief
engineer, "who would handle the

special arrangements for ferrying across men and supplies," to Nijmegen
to see Browning and Horrocks. "I was told," Mackenzie says, "that it
was absolutely vital to impress Horrocks and Browning with the fact
that the division as such had ceased to exist--that we were merely a
collection of individuals hanging on." The limit of endurance had been
reached, Urquhart believed, and Mackenzie was to impress on them "that
if we don't get men and supplies over by tonight, it may be too
late."

Urquhart stood by as Mackenzie and Myers prepared to leave. He knew
that the trip would be dangerous, perhaps impossible, yet it seemed
reasonable to assume--if Horrocks' messages were to be believed and the
43rd Wessex attack was launched on schedule--that some kind of route
would be open to Nijmegen by the time Mackenzie and Myers crossed the
river. As the men left Urquhart had "one final word for Charles. I
told him to try and make them realize what a fix we were in. Charles
said he would do his best, and I knew he would." Taking a rubber boat,
Myers and Mackenzie set out by jeep for lower Oosterbeek and the
Rhine.

Ten miles away, in the Nijmegen area north of the Waal,
twenty-six-year-old Captain Lord Richard Wrottesley, commanding a troop
of the 2nd Household Cavalry, sat in an armored car ready to give the
command to move out. During the night his reconnaissance unit had been
ordered to lead the squadron ahead of the attacking 43rd Wessex
Division and make contact with the airborne forces. Since the day
before, when the Irish Guards had been stopped, Wrottesley had been
"fully aware of the German strength north of Nijmegen." No news had
been received from either the Poles at Driel or the 1/ Airborne, "so
somebody had to find out what was happening." The squadron's role,
young Wrottesley remembers, was to "find a way past the enemy defenses
by bashing through." By avoiding the main Nijmegen-Arnhem highway and
traveling the gridiron of secondary roads to the west, Wrottesley
believed, there was a good chance of sprinting through the enemy
defenses under cover of an early morning mist "which could contribute
to our luck." At first light Wrottesley gave the order to move out.
Quickly his two armored cars and

two scout cars disappeared into the fog. Following behind him came a
second troop under Lieutenant Arthur Young. Traveling fast, the force
swung west of the village of Oosterhout, following the Waal riverbank
for about six miles. Then, looping back, they headed due north for
Driel. "At one point we saw several Germans, Wrottesley remembers,
"but they seemed to be more startled than we were." Two and a half
hours later, at 8 A.m., Friday, September 22, the first link between
the Market-Garden ground forces and the 1/ British Airborne was made.
The forty-eight hours that Montgomery had envisioned before the link-up
had been stretched out to four days and eighteen hours. Wrottesley and
Lieutenant Young, surpassing the attempt of the Guards Armored tanks on
Thursday, had reached Driel and the Rhine without firing a shot.

Lieutenant H. S. Hopkinson's third troop, coming up behind them, ran
into trouble. The morning mist suddenly lifted and as the unit was
sighted, enemy armor opened up. "Driver Read in the first car was
immediately killed," Hopkinson says. "I went forward to help, but the
scout car was blazing and enemy tanks continued to fire on us. We were
forced to retire." For the moment, the Germans once more had closed
off a relief route to Urquhart's 1/ Airborne Division.

The strange, crippling paralysis that had steadily invaded the
Market-Garden plan from its very beginning was intensifying. At dawn
on Friday, September 22, General Thomas' long-awaited 43rd Wessex
Division was to break out from Nijmegen to aid the Guards Armored
column still stalled at Elst. The plan called for one brigade--the
129th-- to advance along each side of the elevated highway, through
Elst and on to Arnhem; simultaneously, a second brigade, the 214th, was
to attack farther west through the town of Oosterhout and strike for
Driel and the ferry site. Incredibly, it had taken the Wessexes almost
three days to travel from the Escaut Canal--a distance of a little more
than sixty miles. In part this was due to the constant enemy attacks
against the corridor; but some would later charge that it was also due
to the

excessive cautiousness of the methodical Thomas. His division might
have covered the distance more quickly on foot. * * Chester Wilmot,
The Struggle for Europe, p. 516.

Now, mishap overtook the 43rd Wessex again. To the bitter
disappointment of General Essame, commander of the 214th Brigade, one
of his lead battalions, the 7th Somersets, had lost its way and had
failed to cross the Waal during the night of the twenty-first. "Where
the hell have you been?" Essame heatedly demanded of its commander
when the force finally arrived. The Somersets had been held up by
crowds and roadblocks in Nijmegen; several companies were separated in
the confusion and directed over the wrong bridge. Essame's plan to
take advantage of the dawn mist and drive toward Driel was lost. The
two-pronged attack did not jump off until 8:30 A.m. In full light the
enemy, alerted by the Household Cavalry's reconnaissance unit, was
prepared. By 9:30 a resourceful German commander at Oosterhout,
skillfully using tanks and artillery, had successfully pinned down the
214th Brigade; and the 129th, heading toward Elst and trying to support
Colonel Vandeleur's Irish Guards, came under fire from Major Knaust's
massed tanks, which General Bittrich had ordered south to crush the
Anglo-American drive. On this critical Friday, when, in Urquhart's
opinion, the fate of the British 1/ Airborne was dependent on immediate
relief, it would be late afternoon before the 43rd Wessex would capture
Oosterhout --too late to move troops in mass to help the surrounded men
in Oosterbeek.

Like Essame, others were angered by the sluggish progress of the
attack. Lieutenant Colonel George Taylor, commanding the 5th Duke of
Cornwall's Light Infantry, * could not understand "what was holding
everything up." He knew the Garden forces were already three days
behind schedule in reaching the 1/ * The names of the famous British
regiments involved always caused confusion for Americans--especially
when they were abbreviated. At First Allied Airborne headquarters a
message concerning the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry arrived,
reading, "5DECLAREI are to make contact with 1 Airborne Division ..."
The puzzled duty officer finally decoded the message. He reported
"Five Duck Craft Landing Infantry" were on their way to Urquhart.

Airborne. He was uncomfortably aware that higher command headquarters
was worried, too. On Thursday he had met General Horrocks, the Corps
commander, who had asked him, "George, what would you do?" Without
hesitation, Taylor had suggested rushing a special task force to the
Rhine on Thursday night carrying 2-astb-ton amphibious vehicles
(Dukw's) filled with supplies. "My idea was a shot in the dark,"
Taylor recalls. "Horrocks looked slightly startled and, as people do
sometimes when they consider a suggestion impractical, he quickly
changed the conversation."

Taylor now waited impatiently for orders to move his battalion across
the Waal river. It was not until midday Friday that a major, a staff
officer from XXX Corps, arrived to tell him that his battalion would be
given two DUKW'S loaded with supplies and ammunition to take up to
Driel. Additionally, Taylor would have a squadron of tanks of the
Dragoon Guards. "The situation at Arnhem is desperate," the major
said. "The DUKW'S must be moved across the river tonight." Looking at
the heavily laden DUKW'S that arrived in the assembly area at 3:00 P.m.
on Friday afternoon, Taylor wondered if they carried enough supplies.
"Surely," he remarked to his intelligence officer, Lieutenant David
Wilcox, "we've got to get more than this across to them."

Even as the infantry was moving out of the Nijmegen bridgehead, Colonel
Mackenzie and Lieutenant Colonel Myers had reached Sosabowski and the
Poles at Driel. Their crossing of the Rhine had been surprisingly
uneventful. "Only a few shots were fired at us," Mackenzie says, "and
they went over our heads." On the southern side a full-scale battle
was in progress and the Poles were hard pressed, holding off enemy
infantry attacks from the direction of Elst and Arnhem. For some time
Mackenzie and Myers had waited on the Rhine's southern bank for the
Poles. "They had been told by radio to watch out for us," Mackenzie
says. "But there was quite a battle going on, and Sosabowski had his
hands full." Finally, riding bicycles, they were escorted to
Sosabowski's headquarters.

Mackenzie was heartened to discover the Household Cavalry units. But
his hopes of reaching General Browning at Nijmegen

quickly were dashed. To Lord Wrottesley and Lieutenant Arthur Young,
the failure of Hopkinson's third troop of reconnaissance vehicles to
reach Driel meant that the Germans had closed in behind them; nor had
the attack of the 43rd Wessex yet broken through. Mackenzie and Myers
would have to wait until a route was opened.

Wrottesley recalls that "Mackenzie immediately asked to use my radio to
contact Corps headquarters." He began to relay a long message via
Wrottesley's squadron commander for Horrocks and Browning. Urquhart's
chief of staff made no effort to encode his signal. Standing beside
him, Wrottesley heard Mackenzie "in the clear" say, ""We are short of
food, ammunition and medical supplies. We cannot hold out for more
than twenty-four hours. All we can do is wait and pray."" For the
first time Wrottesley realized "that Urquhart's division must be in a
very bad way."

Mackenzie and Myers then conferred with Sosabowski about the urgency of
getting the Poles across. "Even a few men now can make a difference,"
Mackenzie told him. Sosabowski agreed, but asked where the boats and
rafts were to come from. Hopefully DUKW'S, which had been requested,
would arrive by night. Meanwhile, Myers thought, several two-man
rubber dinghies, which the airborne had, could be used. Linked by
hawser they could be pulled back and forth across the river.
Sosabowski was "delighted with the idea." It would be painfully slow,
he said, but "if unopposed, perhaps two hundred men might be shipped
across during the night." By radio, Myers quickly contacted the
Hartenstein to make arrangements for the dinghies. The pathetic and
desperate operation, it was decided, would begin at nightfall.

In the bridgehead across the river, Urquhart's men continued to fight
with extraordinary courage and resolution. Yet, at places about the
perimeter, even the most resolute were voicing worry about relief.
Here and there a looming sense of isolation was growing, infecting the
Dutch as well.

Douw van der Krap, a former Dutch naval officer, had earlier been
placed in command of a twenty-five-man Dutch underground unit which was
to fight alongside the British. The group had been organized at the
instigation of Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters, the Dutch liaison
officer at Urquhart's headquarters. Jan Eijkelhoff, who had helped
make ready the Schoonoord Hotel for casualties on Monday, was charged
with finding German weapons for the group. The British could give each
man only five rounds of ammunition--if weapons could be found. Driving
as far as Wolfheze, Eijkelhoff found only three or four rifles. At
first the newly appointed commander of the unit, Van der Krap, was
elated at the idea, but his hopes dimmed. His men would be instantly
executed if captured while fighting with the paratroopers. "Without
relief and supplies for themselves, it was obvious the British couldn't
last," Van der Krap recalls. "They couldn't arm us and they couldn't
feed us and I decided to disband the group." Van der Krap, however,
remained with the paratroopers. "I wanted to fight," he says, "but I
didn't think we had a chance."

Young Anje van Maanen, who had been so excited by the paratroopers'
arrival and the daily expectation of seeing "Monty's tanks," was now
terrified by the continuous shelling and constantly changing battle
lines. "The noise and the hell go on," she wrote in her diary. "I
can't bear it any longer. I'm so scared and I can't think of anything
but shells and death." Anje's father, Dr. Gerritt van Maanen, working
alongside British doctors at the Tafelberg Hotel, brought news to his
family whenever he could, but to Anje the battle had assumed
unrealistic proportions. "I don't understand," she wrote. "One side
of a street is British, the other German, and people kill each other
from both sides. There are house, floor and room fights." On Friday,
Anje wrote, "the British say Monty will be here at any moment. I don't
believe that. Monty can go to hell! He will never come."

In the Schoonoord Hotel, where British and German wounded crowded the
wide veranda and lay in the reception rooms, passageways and bedrooms,
Hendrika van der Vlist could hardly

believe it was Friday. The hospital was constantly changing hands. On
Wednesday the hotel had been taken by the Germans, on Thursday by the
British; and by Friday morning it had been recaptured by the Germans.
Control of the Schoonoord was less important than the need to prevent
it being fired on. A large Red Cross flag flew on the roof, and
numerous smaller ones were spotted around the grounds, but the dust and
flying debris often obscured the pennants. Orderlies, nurses and
doctors worked on, seemingly oblivious to anything but the constant
flow of wounded men.

Hendrika had slept in her clothes for only a few hours each night,
getting up to assist doctors and orderlies as fresh casualties were
carried in. Fluent in English and German, she had originally noted a
pessimism among the Germans in contrast to the patient cheerfulness of
the British. Now many of the severely wounded Red Devils seemed
stoically prepared to accept their fate. As she brought one trooper
the minuscule portion of soup and a biscuit that constituted the only
meal the hospital could provide, he pointed to a newly arrived
casualty. "Give it to him," he told Hendrika. Pulling down the man's
blanket, she saw he wore a German uniform. "German, eh?" the trooper
asked. Hendrika nodded. "Give him the food anyway," the Britisher
said, "I ate yesterday." Hendrika stared at him. "Why is there a war
on, really?" she asked. Tiredly, he shook his head. In her diary she
put down her private fears: "Has our village become one of the
bloodiest battlefields? What is holding up the main army? It cannot
go on like this any longer."

In Dr. Onderwater's cellar, where the Voskuil family was sheltering
along with some twenty others, both Dutch and British, Mrs. Vosktiil
noticed for the first time that the floor was slippery with blood.
During the night two wounded officers, Major Peter Warr and Lieutenant
Colonel Ken Smyth, had been brought in by British troopers. Both men
were seriously wounded, Warr in the thigh and Smyth in the stomach.
Shortly after the injured men were laid on the floor, the Germans burst
in. One of them threw a grenade. Lance Corporal George Wyllie of

Colonel Smyth's 10th Battalion remembers "a flash of light and then a
deafening explosion." Mrs. Voskuil, sitting behind Major Warr, felt
"red hot pain" in her legs. In the now-dark cellar she heard someone
shouting, "Kill them! Kill them!" She felt a man's body fall heavily
across her. It was Private Albert Willingham, who had apparently
jumped in front of Mrs. Voskuil to protect her. Corporal Wyllie saw a
gaping wound open in Willingham's back. He remembers the woman sitting
on a chair with a child beside her, the dead paratrooper across her
lap. The child seemed covered with blood. "My God!" Wyllie thought
as he lost consciousness, "we've killed a child." Suddenly the fierce
battle was over. Someone shone a torch. "Do you still live?" Mrs.
Voskuil called out to her husband. Then she reached for her son,
Henri. The child did not respond to her cries. She was sure he was
dead. "Suddenly I didn't care what happened," she says. "It just
didn't matter any more."

She saw that soldiers and civilians alike were terribly wounded and
screaming. In front of her, Major Warr's tunic was "bloody and gaping
open." Everyone was shouting or sobbing. "Silence," Mrs. Voskuil
yelled in English. "Silence!" The heavy burden across her body was
pulled away and then she saw Wyllie nearby. "The English boy got up,
shaking visibly. He had his rifle butt on the floor and the bayonet,
almost level with my eyes, jerked back and forth as he tried to steady
himself. Low animal-like sounds--almost like a dog or a wolf--were
coming from him."

Corporal Wyllie's head began to clear. Someone had now lit a candle in
the cellar, and a German officer gave him a sip of brandy. Wyllie
noticed the bottle bore a Red Cross insignia, and underneath the words,
"His Majesty's Forces." As he was led out Wyllie looked back at the
lady "whose child was dead." He wanted to say something to her but
"couldn't find the words." * * Wyllie never again saw the Voskuils,
nor did he know their names. For years he worried about the woman in
the cellar and the child he believed dead. Today young Henri Voskuil
is a doctor.

The German officer asked Mrs. Voskuil to tell the British "they have
fought gallantly and behaved like gentlemen, but now they must
surrender. Tell them it is over." As the paratroopers were

taken out, a German medical orderly examined Henri. "He is in a coma,"
he told Mrs. Voskuil. "He is grazed along the stomach and his eyes
are discolored and swollen, but he will be all right." Mutely she
nodded her head.

On the floor Major Warr, his shoulder bones protruding through the skin
from the explosion, shouted, cursed and then fell unconscious again.
Leaning over, Mrs. Voskuil moistened her handkerchief and wiped the
blood from his lips. A short distance away Colonel Smyth mumbled
something. A German guard turned, questioningly, toward Mrs. Voskuil.
"He wants a doctor," she said softly. The soldier left the cellar and
returned a few minutes later with a German doctor. Examining Smyth,
the physician said, "Tell the officer I am sorry to have to hurt him
but I must look at his wound. Tell him to grit his teeth." As he
began pulling away the clothing, Smyth fainted.

At daylight the civilians were ordered to leave. Two SS men carried
Mrs. Voskuil and Henri out into the street, and a Dutch Red Cross
worker directed them to the cellar of a dentist, Dr. Phillip Clous.
Voskuil's parents-in-law did not go. They preferred to take their
chances at home. In the Clous house, the dentist warmly welcomed the
family. "Don't worry," he told Voskuil. "It's going to be all right.
The British will win." Voskuil, standing beside his wounded wife and
child, his mind still filled with the night's horrors, stared at the
man. "No," he said quietly, "they will not."

Though they were unwilling to recognize that their endurance had nearly
run its course, many paratroopers knew that they could not hold on
alone much longer. Staff Sergeant Dudley Pearson was tired "of being
pushed around by the Germans." On the northern edge of the perimeter,
he and his men had been chased by tanks, pinned down in woods and
forced to fight off the Germans with bayonets. Finally, on Thursday
night, as the perimeter tightened, Pearson's group was ordered to pull
back. He was told to cover the withdrawal with a smoke grenade.
Nearby he heard a lone Bren gun firing. Scrambling through underbrush
he discovered a corporal hidden in a deep hollow in the woods. "Get
out," Pearson told him. "I'm the last one here."

The corporal shook his head. "Not me, sergeant," he said. "I'm
staying. I won't let those bastards by." As Pearson made his way back
he could hear the Bren-gunner firing. He thought the situation was
hopeless. He began to wonder if it wouldn't be better to surrender.

In a slit trench near the tennis courts at the Hartenstein--where the
earth was now crisscrossed with foxholes that the German prisoners had
been allowed to dig for their own protection--Glider Pilot Victor
Miller stared at the body of another pilot, who lay sprawled a few
yards away. Firing had been so intense that men had not been able to
remove the dead. Miller saw that since the last mortaring the body was
half buried by leaves and shattered branches. He kept staring at the
corpse, wondering if anyone would come to pick it up. He was
frightened that the features of his dead friend would change, and he
was certain there was a "strong smell of death." He felt sick. He
remembers thinking wildly that "if something isn't done soon, we'll all
be corpses. The shells will eliminate us one by one, until this will
be only a park of the dead."

Other men felt they were being exhorted to keep up courage without
access to the facts. Private William O'Brien, near the church in lower
Oosterbeek, remembers that "every night an officer came around and told
us to hang on, the Second Army would arrive the next day. There was a
helluva lot of apathy. Everyone was asking what the hell they were
there forand where the hell was the goddam army. We'd had it."
Sergeant Edward Mitchell, a glider pilot, in a position opposite the
church, remembers one man locked himself in a nearby shed. "He would
let no one near. Every now and again he'd shout, "Come on, you
bastards," and empty a magazine all around the shed." For hours, the
lone trooper alternately shouted and fired, then lapsed into periods of
silence. As Mitchell and others debated how to get him out, there was
another sharp burst of fire and then silence. Reaching the shed, they
found the paratrooper dead.

Here and there shell-shocked, concussed, battle-fatigued men roamed the
Hartenstein area, finally oblivious to the battle. Medic Taffy Brace,
who on Tuesday had tended the mangled

body of his friend, Andy Milbourne, was encountering these tragic,
pathetic men as he treated the wounded. By now Brace had run out of
morphia, and he was using paper bandages. He could not bring himself
to reveal that he had no medication. "What would you be wanting
morphia for?" he asked one critically wounded trooper. "Morphia's for
people who are really hurt. You're doing fine."

As Brace bandaged the man, he was aware of a strange hooting sound
behind him. Turning he saw a totally naked paratrooper, pumping his
arms up and down and "sounding like a locomotive." As Brace caught his
eye, the soldier began to curse. "Blast this fireman," the trooper
said, "he was never any good." In one house near the perimeter Brace,
arriving with a casualty, heard a man softly singing "The White Cliffs
of Dover." Thinking the trooper was soothing the other injured, Brace
smiled at him and nodded encouragement. The soldier lunged at Brace
and tried to choke him. "I'll kill you," he yelled. "What do you know
about Dover?" Brace loosened the fingers at his throat. "It's all
right," he said gently, "I've been there." The man stepped back.
"Oh," he said, "that's all right then." Minutes later he began to sing
again. Others remember a shell-shocked trooper who walked among them
at night. Bending over the huddled forms of men trying to sleep he
would shake them roughly awake, stare into their eyes and ask them all
the same question: "Have you got faith?"

Despite those pitiable, shocked and desperate men whose faith was gone,
hundreds of others were bolstered by the actions of eccentric,
undaunted soldiers who seemed utterly fearless and who refused to give
in to wounds or hardships. Major Dickie Lonsdale, commander of the
"Lonsdale Force," holding positions about the church in lower
Oosterbeek, seemed to be everywhere. "His was a figure that would
inspire terror," recalls Sergeant Dudley Pearson. "He had one arm in a
bloodstained sling, an equally bloody wrapping around his head and a
giant bandage on

one leg." Hobbling about exhorting his men, Lonsdale led attack after
attack.

Sergeant Major Harry Callaghan, who had added extra touches to his
uniform--he had found a tall black hat in a hearse and wore it
everywhere, explaining to the men that he had been named "the Airborne
representative to Hitler's funeral"--remembers the awesome-looking
Lonsdale deliver a ringing, defiant speech to men in the church.
Officers and noncoms had rounded up troopers and sent them to the
ancient ruined building. "The roof was gone," Callaghan remembers,
"and each new explosion sent plaster cascading down." As soldiers
leaned listlessly against walls and broken pews--smoking, lounging,
half-asleep--Lonsdale climbed into the pulpit. Men stared upward at
the fierce-looking, bloodstained figure. "We've fought the Germans in
North Africa, Sicily and Italy," Callaghan remembers Lonsdale saying.
"They weren't good enough for us then! They're bloody well not good
enough for us now!" Captain Michael Corrie of the Glider Pilot
Regiment had been struck as he entered the church "by the weariness I
saw. But Lonsdale's speech was stirring. I felt stuuned by his words,
and proud. The men went in looking beaten, but as they came out, they
had new spirit. You could read it on their faces."

Some men seemed to have overcome even the paralyzing fear that the
brute force of enemy armored attacks instilled. With few antitank
guns, troopers were helpless against tanks and self-propelled guns that
roamed the perimeter, pulverizing position after position. Yet,
somehow the foot soldiers were fighting back. Even 60-ton Tigers were
destroyed--often by men who had never before fired an antitank gun.
Lance Corporal Sydney Nunn, who had eagerly looked forward to Arnhem as
an escape from the "nightmare" of his camp in England and the mole
which had invaded his mattress, now faced a far more dreadful nightmare
with outward calm. He and another paratrooper, Private Nobby Clarke,
had become friendly with a glider pilot in an adjoining slit trench.
During a lull in the mortaring, the pilot called over to Nunn, "I don't
know whether you know it, old lad, but there's a

whopping great tank out in front to our right. One of the Tiger
family." Clarke looked at Nunn. "What are we supposed to do?" he
asked. "Go drill holes in it?"

Cautiously Nunn looked over the edge of the trench. The tank was
"enormous." Nearby in the bushes an antitank gun was concealed, but
its crew had been killed, and no one in Nunn's group knew how to load
or fire the weapon. Nunn and the glider pilot decided to crawl to it.
As the men climbed out they were spotted and the tank's gun began
firing. "We dug grooves in the soil with our noses, we were that low,"
Nunn recalls. "Our little woods began to look like a logging camp as
trees came down all around us." The two men reached the gun just as
the Tiger "began to give us personal attention with its machine gun."
The pilot sighted down the barrel of the gun and shouted happily. "Our
gun was pointed directly at the tank. If we'd known how to do it, we
couldn't have aimed it better." Looking at Nunn, the glider pilot
said, "I hope this thing works." He pulled the trigger. In the heavy
explosion that followed, both men were thrown on their backs. "When
our ears stopped ringing, I heard other men around us begin to laugh
and cheer," Nunn says. As he stared disbelievingly, he saw the Tiger
engulfed in flames, its ammunition exploding. Turning to Nunn, the
glider pilot solemnly shook hands. "Our game, I think," he said.

Many men remember Major Robert Cain of the 2nd South Staffordshires as
the real expert against tanks and self-propelled guns. It seemed to
Cain that he and his men had been pursued and threatened by Tigers ever
since they had arrived. Now, with his small force positioned at the
church in lower Oosterbeek, in houses and gardens across the road, and
in a laundry owned by a family named Van Dolderen, Cain was determined
to knock out every piece of armor he saw. Searching for the best site
from which to operate, Cain picked the Van Dolderen house. The laundry
owner was unwilling to leave. Surveying the back garden, Cain said,
"Well, be that as it may, I'm going to dig in out there. I'm using
your place for my ammo dump."

Cain was using the bazookalike antitank weapon known as a

Piat to hunt down armor. On Friday, as the street battles grew in
intensity, Cain's eardrums burst from his constant firing. Stuffing
pieces of field dressing into his ears he continued lobbing bombs.

Suddenly someone called out to Cain that two tanks were coming up the
road. At the corner of a building, Cain loaded the Piat and aimed it.
Staff Sergeant Richard Long, a glider pilot, looked on aghast. "He was
the bravest man I've ever seen," Long says. "He was only about a
hundred yards away when he started to fire." The tank fired back
before Cain could reload, and the shell hit the building in back of
him. In the thick swirl of dust and debris, Cain fired again and then
again. He saw the crew of the first tank bail out, spraying the street
with machine-gun bullets. Immediately around Cain, paratroopers opened
up with Bren guns and, Cain remembers, "the Germans were just cut off
their feet." Reloading again, he fired, and Sergeant Long saw "a
tremendous flash. The bomb had gone off inside the Piat. Major Cain
threw his hands in the air and fell backward. When we got to him, his
face was black. His first words were, "I think I'm blind."" Staff
Sergeant Walton Ashworth, one of the Bren-gunners who had shot up the
German tank crew, stared stonily as Cain was taken away. "All I could
think was "that poor bloody bastard.""

Within half an hour Cain's sight had returned, but his face was
imbedded with bits of metal. He refused morphia and, deciding that he
"wasn't wounded enough to stay where he was," went back to the
battle--as Captain W. A. Taylor described it, "to add to his bag of
enemy tanks." By Friday afternoon, the thirty-five-year-old Cain had a
bagful. Since landing on the eighteenth he had put out of action or
driven off a total of six tanks, plus a number of self-propelled
guns.

Ferocious men throughout the airhead were making heroic stands,
unmindful of their own safety. By dusk on Friday Corporal Leonard
Formoy, one of the survivors of Colonel Fitch's 3rd Battalion, who had
made the desperate march to reach Frost's men at the Arnhem bridge,
occupied a position on the western outskirts not far from Division
headquarters at the Hartenstein.

"We were being hit from practically all sides," Formoy remembers.
Suddenly a Tiger tank, coming from the direction of Arnhem, rumbled
toward the cluster of men around Formoy. In the twilight Formoy saw
the turret swivel. Sergeant "Cab" Calloway picked up a Piat and rushed
forward. "You're going where I'm going!" Formoy heard him yell.
Approximately fifty yards away from the tank, Calloway fired. The bomb
exploded against the tracks and the tank stopped, but Calloway was
killed at almost the same moment by its guns. "It was an act of
desperation," Formoy remembers. "He was just ripped in half, but he
saved our lives."

Private James Jones remembers an unknown major who asked Jones and
three others to go with him outside the perimeter on a search for guns
and ammunition. The small party came suddenly upon some Germans in a
machine-gun nest. Leaping up, the major fired, yelling, "There's some
more of those bastards who won't live!" As the Germans opened up, the
group scattered and Jones was trapped behind a disabled jeep. "I said
a prayer, waited for another burst from the gun, and got back to the
lines," Jones recalls. He never saw the major again.

Senior officers, often unaware of the impression they made, set
examples their men would never forget. Brigadier Pip Hicks refused to
wear a helmet throughout the battle. Trooper William Chandler, one of
Major Freddie Gough's Reconnaissance Squadron men whose group had been
cut off on the northern, Leopard route on Sunday and had been moved
back to a crossroads at Oosterbeek, remembers Hicks's red beret
standing out among groups of helmeted men. "Hey, Brigadier," someone
called out, "put your bloody helmet on." Hicks just smiled and waved.
"I wasn't trying to be debonair," Hicks explains. "I just couldn't
stand the damn thing bouncing around on my head." His activities might
have had something to do with that. Some men recall Hicks's frequent
daily trips to Urquhart's headquarters. He started each journey at a
jog and ended up sprinting a step ahead of German shellfire. "I felt
fully my age when I finished those mad dashes," Hicks confesses.

Brigadier Shan Hackett, who had brought his battered 10th and 156th
battalions back to the Oosterbeek area after their brave but futile
attempt to break through the German defenses to the north and east and
get to Arnhem, visited his men constantly, offering them quiet words of
praise. Major George Powell was commanding two platoons of the 156th
in perimeter positions to the north. "We were short on food,
ammunition and water," Powell remembers, "and we had few medical
supplies." On Friday Hackett suddenly appeared at Powell's command
post, where, says Powell, "we were literally poking right into the
enemy's lines." Hackett explained that he had not had time to visit
Powell until now, "but you've been holding so well, George, I wasn't
worried about you." Powell was pleased. "The only real mistake I've
made so far, sir," he said, "is putting the headquarters in a chicken
run. We're all alive with fleas." To Staff Sergeant Dudley Pearson,
chief clerk of the 4th Brigade, Hackett earned respect because "he
shared with us as though he had no rank. If we ate, he did, and if we
went hungry, so did he. He didn't seem to have a mess kit. On Friday
he sat down with us and ate a little piece of food with his fingers."
Pearson went to find a knife and fork. On the way back he was wounded
in the heel; but, he says, "I thought the Brigadier rather deserved
something better than the way he was living among us."

And Signalman Kenneth Pearce, attached to Command Artillery Signals at
Division headquarters, will always remember the man who came to his
aid. Pearce was in charge of the heavy storage batteries, called
"Dags"--each weighing approximately twenty-five pounds and encased in a
wooden box with cast-iron handles-- that powered the signal sets. In
the late evening Pearce was struggling to move a fresh Dag from the
deep trench in which they were stored. Above him, he heard someone
Say, "Here, let me help you." Pearce directed the man to grab one
handle and pull up the set. Together the two dragged the cumbersome
box to the command-post trench. "There's one more," Pearce said.
"Let's go get it." The men made the second trip and, back at the
command post, Pearce jumped into the trench as the other man hoisted
the boxes down to him. As they walked away Pearce suddenly noticed
that the man wore red staff officer's tabs. Stopping dead, he
stammered, "Thank you very much, sir." General Urquhart nodded.
"That's all right, son," he said.

Step by terrible step the crisis was mounting; nothing went right on
this day, which General Horrocks was to call "Black Friday." Weather
conditions in both England and Holland again grounded Allied planes,
preventing resupply missions. In answer to Urquhart's plea for fighter
strikes, the R.a.f. replied: "... After most careful examination regret
owing to storm unable to accept ..." And, at this moment, when
Horrocks needed every man, tank and ton of supplies to retain
Montgomery's bridgehead over the Rhine and break through to the Red
Devils, Field Marshal Model's counteroffensive finally succeeded in
cutting the corridor. Thirty minutes after receiving Mackenzie's
message that Urquhart might be overrun in twenty-four hours, General
Horrocks received another message: in the 101/ Airborne's sector,
powerful German armored forces had cut the corridor north of Veghel.

Model could hardly have chosen a more vital spot or timed his attack
better. British infantry forces of the XII and VIII Corps, advancing
on either side of the highway, had only now reached Son, barely five
miles into the 101/'s area. Fighting against stiff resistance, they
had made agonizingly slow progress. The 101/'s commander, General
Taylor, had expected the British to reach his sector of "Hell's
Highway" long before. After more than five days of continuous fighting
without support, Taylor's hard-pressed troopers were thinly spread and
vulnerable. Along some stretches the highway was unguarded except by
the British armor and infantry moving along it on the way north.
Elsewhere, the "front" was literally the sides of the road. Field
Marshal Model had chosen to counterattack at Veghel for a particular
reason: throughout the entire length of the Market-Garden corridor
the

Veghel area contained the greatest cluster of bridges--no fewer than
four, of which one was a major canal crossing. With one stroke Model
hoped to strangle the Allied lifeline. He almost did. He might have
succeeded, but for the Dutch underground.

During the night and early morning, in villages and hamlets east of
Veghel, the Dutch spotted the German buildup; they promptly phoned
liaison officers with the 101/. The Warning came not a moment too
soon. Massed German armor almost overwhelmed Taylor's men. Twice in
four hours, in a wild melee that ranged over a five-mile stretch of the
corridor, German tanks tried to push through to the bridges.
Desperately, Taylor's men, aided by British artillery and armor on the
road, threw back the attacks. But four miles to the north, at Uden,
the Germans succeeded in cutting the corridor. Now, with the battle
still raging and the forces in the rear cut off and isolated, Horrocks
was forced to make a fateful decision: he would have to send armored
units--urgently needed in his efforts to reach Urquhart--back south
down the corridor to help General Taylor, whose need was now even more
urgent. The 32nd Guards Brigade was sent rushing south to support the
101/ in reopening the highway. The gallant 101/ would hang on to the
bridges, but even with the help of the Guards, not a man, tank or
supply vehicle would move north along the corridor for the next
twenty-four hours. Model's counteroffensive, though unsuccessful for
the moment, had still paid enormous dividends. In the end, the battle
for the corridor would decide the fate of Arnhem.

By 4 P.m. on Friday, September 22, in the Nijmegen-Arnhem area--six and
one-half hours after they had first been pinned down by German tanks
and artillery--British infantrymen finally bludgeoned their way through
Oosterhout. The village was in flames, and SS prisoners were being
rounded up. The relief route west of the "island" highway, the
low-lying secondary roads used

by the enterprising Household Cavalry in their race to Driel at dawn,
was now believed to be free or, at worst, only lightly held by the
enemy. The 5th Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, supported by a
squadron of Dragoon Guards' tanks and carrying the precious two
amphibious vehicles loaded with supplies, was ready to slam through
whatever opposition remained and dash for the Rhine. Lieutenant
Colonel George Taylor, commanding the force, was so eager to get to
Urquhart that he "felt a mad desire to sweep my infantry onto the tanks
with my hands and get moving."

In a small wood north of Oosterhout, his loaded vehicles waited to move
out. Suddenly, off in the distance, Taylor spotted two Tiger tanks.
Quietly he warned Lieutenant David Wilcox, his intelligence officer,
"Don't say anything. I don't want anyone to know about those tanks.
We can't stop now." Taylor waved the relief column up the road. "If
we had waited five minutes more," he says, "I knew the route would have
been closed again."

At full speed--his infantry mounted on tanks, carriers and
trucks--Taylor's column rolled through Dutch hamlets and villages.
Everywhere they were met by surprised, cheering villagers, but there
was no slowdown. Taylor's only concern was to get to the Rhine. "I
felt a sense of great urgency," he says. "Any time lost would give the
enemy an opportunity to move up a blocking force." The convoy met no
opposition, and for Taylor, "it was an exhilarating feeling as the
light faded rapidly and the head of the column reached Driel." They
had covered the ten-mile journey in just thirty minutes. At 5:30 P.m.
the first tanks of the Dragoon Guards reached the Rhine and, skirting
northeast along its banks, moved into the outskirts of the village.
Taylor heard an explosion and guessed immediately what it was: on the
cautious Sosabowski's defense perimeter, one of the tanks had run over
a Polish mine.

It was dark when Taylor reached Sosabowski's headquarters. The
information he had about Urquhart's division was vague. "I had no idea
where they were in Arnhem or if they still held one

end of the bridge." But Taylor planned to send his infantry and tanks
immediately toward the southern end. He knew the DUKW'S must get
"across as soon as possible and if the bridge was still held it would
be obviously quicker to drive them across than to float them over." At
Sosabowski's headquarters, Taylor was astonished to find Colonel
Charles Mackenzie and Lieutenant Colonel Myers. Quickly they dissuaded
him from heading out for the Arnhem bridge. Nothing had been heard
from Frost, Mackenzie explained, since Wednesday night and it was
presumed at headquarters that "it was all over at the bridge."

Reluctantly Taylor gave up his plan and ordered out a reconnaissance
group to scout along the riverbank for a site from which the DUKW'S
might be launched. Sosabowski's engineers were not optimistic; the
awkward amphibious vehicles would prove cumbersome to manhandle across
ditches and banks down to the river, especially in the dark. A short
while later Taylor's reconnaissance group confirmed the Poles' opinion.
The river could be approached, they thought, only by one narrow
ditch-lined road. In spite of the serious obstacles, Taylor's men
believed they could get the DUKW'S down to the Rhine. Colonel
Mackenzie, still unable to continue on to Nijmegen, would oversee the
launching. The DUKW'S would cross the river at 2 A.m. on Saturday, the
twenty-third. First priority, however, was to get men into the
bridgehead: Sosabowski's Poles had to be ferried over in the little
string of rubber boats.

At 9 P.m. on Friday night that operation began. Silently crouching
along the riverbank, the Polish soldiers waited. On both sides of the
river engineers, under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Myers, stood
ready to pull the hawser attaching the rubber dinghies back and forth.
In just four boats--two 2-man and two 1-man dinghies--only six men
could cross the 400-yard-wide Rhine at a time. Supplementing the craft
were several wooden rafts that the Polish engineers had constructed to
carry small supplies and stores. On Sosabowski's order the first six
men got into the boats and moved out. Within a few minutes the men
were across. Behind them came a string of rafts. As fast as men

landed on the northern bank the boats and rafts were hauled back. "It
was a slow, laborious process," Sosabowski noted, "but so far the
Germans seemed to suspect nothing."

Then, from a point to the west of the landing site across the river a
light shot up into the sky, and almost immediately the whole area was
brilliantly lit by a magnesium parachute flare. Instantly Spandau
machine guns began raking the river, "stirring up small waves and
making the water boil with hot steel," Sosabowski recalls.
Simultaneously, mortar shells began to fall among the waiting Poles.
Within minutes two rubber boats were riddled, their occupants heaved
into the river. On the southern bank, men scattered, firing at the
parachute flare. In the wild melee, Sosabowski halted the operation.
Men moved back and took up new positions, trying to avoid the bursting
mortar shells. The moment the flare dimmed and burned out, they ran to
the boats and rafts, climbed in, and the crossings began again.
Another flare burst in the sky. In this cruel game of hide-and-seek
the Poles, suffering terrible casualties, continued to cross the river
all night in the remaining boats. At the schoolhouse in Driel which
had been temporarily turned into a casualty station, Cora Baltussen
tended the injured as they were brought in. "We can't get across," a
Pole told her. "It's a slaughter up there--and we can't even fire
back."

At 2 A.m., Taylor's amphibious DUKW'S began moving down to the river.
Because of heavy rain during the day, the low, narrow, ditch-lined road
was inches thick in mud. And, as the DUKW'S, surrounded by sixty men,
slowly approached the river, a heavy ground mist formed. Men could not
see either the road or the river. Again and again, struggling soldiers
labored to straighten the vehicles as they slid off the road. Supplies
were unloaded to lighten the DUKW'S, but even this was not enough.
Finally, despite strenuous efforts to hold them back, the cumbersome
vehicles slid into the ditch only yards from the Rhine. "It's no
good," the despairing Mackenzie told Taylor. "It's just hopeless." At
3 A.m., the entire operation came to a halt. Only fifty men and almost
no supplies had been ferried across the river into Urquhart's
bridgehead. 3

By the time Colonel Charles Mackenzie finally reached General
Browning's headquarters in Nijmegen on Saturday morning, September 23,
he was "dead tired, frozen stiff, and his teeth were chattering,"
Brigadier Gordon Walch, the chief of staff, remembers. In spite of his
determination to see Browning immediately, Mackenzie was promptly "put
in a bath to thaw out."

British forces using the relief route west of, and parallel to, the
"island" highway were now moving steadily up to Driel, but the roads
were far from clear of the enemy. Still, Lord Wrottesley had decided
to try to get Mackenzie and Lieutenant Colonel Myers back to Nijmegen.
The brief trip, in a small convoy of reconnaissance vehicles, was
hair-raising. As the party approached a crossroads, they found a
partly destroyed German half-track lying slewed across it. Wrottesley
got out to guide his vehicles, and at that point, a Tiger tank appeared
farther down the road. To avoid an encounter, the armored car carrying
Mackenzie began backing away, when suddenly the road collapsed beneath
it and the car turned over. Mackenzie and the crew were forced to hide
out from German infantry in a field as Wrottesley, yelling to the
driver of his scout car "to go like hell," headed up the road toward
Nijmegen to find British troops. Organizing a relief force, Wrottesley
sped back down the road to find Mackenzie. When the little force
arrived the German tank was gone and Mackenzie and the crew of the
armored car came up to meet them from the field where they had taken
cover. In the confusion Myers, following in a second armored car,
became separated from the troop.

General Browning greeted Mackenzie anxiously. According to his staff,
"the week had been a series of agonizing and tragic setbacks." More
than anything else the lack of full communications with Urquhart had
contributed to Browning's concern. Even now, although messages were
passing between the British 1/ Airborne Division and Corps, Browning's
picture of Urquhart's situation was apparently very vague. In the
original Market-Garden plan the 52nd Lowland Division was to have been
flown into the Arnhem area once Urquhart's men had found a suitable
landing site--ideally by Thursday, September 21. When Urquhart's
desperate situation became known, the 52nd's commanding officer, Major
General Edmund Hakewill Smith, promptly offered to risk taking in part
of his unit by glider, to land as close as possible to the beleaguered
1/ Airborne. On Friday morning Browning had rejected the proposal,
radioing: "Thanks for your message but offer not repeat not required as
situation better than you think ... 2nd Army definitely ... intend fly
you in to Deelen airfield as soon as situation allows." Later General
Brereton, First Allied Airborne Army commander, noting the message in
his diary, commented, "General Browning was over-optimistic and
apparently then did not fully appreciate the plight of the Red Devils."
At the time, Brereton seemed no better informed than Browning. In a
report to Eisenhower, which was sent on to General Marshall in
Washington on Friday night, Brereton said of the Nijmegen-Arnhem area:
"the situation in this sector is showing great improvement."

Within hours the optimism of Brereton and Browning had faded. Friday's
futile efforts to reach Urquhart seemed to have been the turning point
for the Corps commander. According to his staff, "he was disgusted
with General Thomas and the 43rd Wessex Division." He felt they had
not moved fast enough. Thomas, he told them, had been "too anxious to
tidy things up as he went along." Additionally, Browning's authority
extended only so far: the moment British ground troops entered the
Nijmegen area, administrative control passed over to General Horrocks,
the XXX Corps commander; decisions would be made by Horrocks

and by his chief, the British Second Army's General Miles C. Dempsey.
There was little that Browning could do.

Sitting with the somewhat revived Mackenzie, Browning now learned for
the first time the details of Urquhart's appalling predicament.
Mackenzie, sparing nothing, recounted everything that had happened.
Brigadier Walch remembers Mackenzie telling Browning that "the division
is in a very tight perimeter and low in everything--food, ammunition
and medical supplies." While the situation was acute, Mackenzie said,
"if there is a chance of the Second Army getting to us, we can
hold--but not for long." Walch recollects Mackenzie's grim summation.
"There isn't much left," he said. Browning listened in silence. Then
he assured Mackenzie that he had not given up hope. Plans were now
afoot to get men and supplies into the bridgehead during Saturday
night. But, Brigadier Walch says, "I do remember Browning telling
Charles that there did not seem to be much chance of getting a good
party across."

As Mackenzie set out for Driel once more, he was struck by the
ambivalence of the thinking at Corps headquarters--and by the dilemma
that created for him. Obviously the fate of the British 1/ Airborne
still hung in the balance. No one had as yet made any definite
decisions. But what should he tell Urquhart? "After seeing the
situation on both sides of the river," he says, "I was convinced a
crossing from the south would not be successful and I could tell him
that. Or, I could report, as I was told, that everyone was doing his
best, that there would be a crossing and we should hold on. Which was
better? Tell him that in my opinion there wasn't a chance in hell of
anyone getting over? Or that help was on the way?" Mackenzie decided
on the latter, for he felt it would help Urquhart "to keep people going
if I put it that way."

Like Browning, the Allied high command was only now learning the true
facts of the 1/ Airborne's plight. In off-the-record briefings at
Eisenhower's, at Brereton's and at Montgomery's headquarters, war
correspondents were told that the "situation is serious, but every
measure is being taken to relieve Urquhart." That minor note of
concern represented a radical change in

attitude. Since its inception, Market-Garden had been painted in
public reports as an overwhelming success. On Thursday, September 21,
under a headline announcing that a "tank paradise lies ahead," one
British newspaper's lead story stated: "Hitler's northern flank is
crumbling. Field Marshal Montgomery, with the brilliant aid of the
First Airborne Army, has paved the way into the Ruhr--and to the end of
the war." Even the staid London Times on Friday had such headlines as
"On the Road to Arnhem; Tanks Across the Rhine"; only the subhead
hinted of possible trouble ahead: "Coming Fight for Arnhem; Airborne
Forces' Hard Time." Correspondents could hardly be blamed. Lack of
communications, overenthusiasm on the part of Allied commanders and
strict censorship prevented accurate reporting. Then, overnight, the
picture changed. On Saturday, the twenty-third, the Times's headline
read: "2nd Army Meets Tough Opposition; Airborne Forces' Grim Fight,"
and the London Daily Express was calling Arnhem a "Patch of Hell." * *
Some of the war's finest reporting came out of Arnhem. The ten-man
press team attached to the 1/ Airborne Division included Major Roy
Oliver, a public information officer; censors Flight Lieutenant Billy
Williams and Captain Peter Brett; army photographers Sergeants Lewis
and Walker; and correspondents Alan Wood, London Daily Express; Stanley
Maxted and Guy Byam, BBC; Jack Smythe, Reuter's, and Marek Swiecicki, a
Polish correspondent attached to Sosabowski's brigade. Although
limited by sparse communications to bulletins of only a few hundred
words per day, these men, in the finest tradition of war reporting,
portrayed the agonies of Urquhart's men. I have been unable to locate
a single corrcspondent of the original team. Presumably, all are
dead.

Yet hopes remained high. On this Saturday, the seventh day of
Market-Garden, the weather over England cleared and Allied planes took
to the air again. * The last of the great fleet of gliders, grounded
in the Grantham area since Tuesday, set out finally for Gavin's 82nd
with 3,385 troops--his long-awaited 325th Glider Infantry Regiment--and
Taylor's hard-pressed 101/ Division was brought up to full strength by
nearly 3,000 more men. But * Inexplicably, some official and
semiofficial British accounts contend that bad weather prevented aerial
activity on Saturday, September 23. Meteorological, Corps and Allied
Air Force after-action reports all record Saturday's weather as fair,
with more missions flown than on any day since Tuesday, the nineteenth.
In the semiofficial Struggle for Europe, Chester Wilmot erred in
stating that on Saturday "aerial resupply had been thwarted by bad
weather." The phrase altered his chronology of the battle thereafter.
Other accounts, using Wilmot as a guide, have compounded the
inaccuracies.

Sosabowski, under heavy attack at Driel, could not be reinforced with
the remainder of his brigade. Browning was forced to direct the rest
of the Poles to drop zones in the 82nd's area. Because of weather
Brereton's three-day air plan to deliver some 35,000 men in the
greatest airborne operation ever conceived had taken more than double
the planned time.

Once again, although resupply missions were successful elsewhere,
Urquhart's men, in their rapidly diminishing pocket about Oosterbeek,
watched cargo fall into enemy hands. Unable to locate the Hartenstein
drop zone, and flying through savage antiaircraft fire, the supply
planes were in constant trouble; 6 of the 123 planes were shot down and
63 damaged. In a message to Browning, Urquhart reported:

231605 ... Resupply by air; very small quantity picked up. Snipers now
severely curtailing movement and therefore collection. Also roads so
blocked by falling trees, branches and houses that movement in jeeps
virtually impossible. Jeeps in any case practically out of action.

Close-in fighter support was inadequate, too. In the Arnhem area the
weather had been bad throughout the morning, clearing only by midday.
As a result only a few flights of R.a.f. Spitfires and Typhoons
attacked targets about the perimeter. Urquhart was baffled. "In view
of our complete aerial superiority," he later recollected, "I was
bitterly disappointed by the lack of fighter support." But to his men,
who had not seen a fighter since D Day, the previous Sunday, the
attacks were heartening. By now, too, most of them had learned that
British troops had finally reached the southern bank of the Rhine at
Driel. Relief, they believed, was close at hand.

In spite of all the setbacks, now that General Thomas' troops were
moving up the side roads to Driel, General Horrocks believed that
Urquhart's worsening situation could be alleviated. Brilliant,
imaginative and determined, Horrocks was opposed to throwing away all
that had been gained. Yet he must find some way to move troops and
supplies into the bridgehead. "I am certain," he later put it, "that
these were about the blackest

moments in my life." He was so distressed at "the picture of the
airborne troops fighting their desperate battle on the other side of
the river" that he could not sleep; and the severing of the corridor
north of Veghel, cut since Friday afternoon, threatened the life of the
entire operation.

Now every hour was vital. Like Horrocks, General Thomas was determined
to get men across the river. His 43rd Wessex was going all-out in a
two-phase operation: attacking to seize Elst and driving toward Driel.
Although by now no one had any illusions that the Arnhem bridge could
be captured--from aerial reconnaissance photos it was clear the enemy
held it in strength-- Thomas' right flank, terminating at Elst, had to
be protected if any operations were to be conducted across the Rhine
from Driel. And Horrocks had hopes that, in addition to the Poles,
some British infantry might cross into the bridgehead on Saturday
night.

His optimism was premature. On the low-lying secondary roads west of
the main Nijmegen-Arnhem highway a giant bottleneck developed as
Thomas' two brigades, each totaling about 3,000 men--one brigade
attacking northeast toward Elst, the other driving north for
Driel--attempted to move through the same crossroads. Enemy shelling
added to the crowding and confusion. Thus, it was dark by the time the
bulk of Thomas' 130th Brigade began to reach Driel--too late to join
the Poles in an organized attempt to cross the river.

Shortly after midnight, Sosabowski's men, heavily supported by
artillery, began crossing, this time in sixteen boats left from the
82nd's assault across the Waal. They came under intense fire and
suffered heavy losses. Only 250 Poles made it to the northern bank,
and of these only 200 reached the Hartenstein perimeter.

On this grim day Horrocks and Thomas received just one piece of good
news: at 4 P.m. the corridor north of Veghel was reopened and traffic
began flowing again. In the engineering columns were more assault
craft, and the stubborn Horrocks was hopeful that they could be rushed
forward in time to pour infantry across the river on Sunday night.

But could the division hang on another twenty-four hours? Urquhart's
plight was rapidly growing worse. In his situation report to Browning
on Saturday night, Urquhart had said:

232015: Many attacks during day by small parties infantry, SP guns,
tanks including flame thrower tanks. Each attack accompanied by very
heavy mortaring and shelling within Div perimeter. After many alarms
and excursions the latter remains substantially unchanged, although
very thinly held. Physical contact not yet made with those on south
bank of river. Resupply a flop, small quantities of ammo only gathered
in. Still no food and all ranks extremely dirty owing to shortage of
water. Morale still adequate, but continued heavy mortaring and
shelling is having obvious effects. We shall hold but at the same time
hope for a brighter 24 hours ahead.

The afternoon's giant Allied glider lift had caught Field Marshal
Walter Model by surprise. At this late date in the battle he had not
anticipated any further Allied airborne landings. These new
reinforcements, coming just as his counteroffensive was gaining
momentum, could change the tide of battle--and even more might be on
the way. For the first time since the beginning of the Allied attack
he began to have doubts about the outcome.

Driving to Doetinchem he conferred with General Bittrich, demanding, as
the II SS Panzer Corps commander remembers, "a quick finish to the
British at Oosterbeek." Model needed every man and tank. Too great a
force was being tied down in a battle that "should have been brought to
an end days before." Model was "very excited," Bittrich says, "and
kept repeating, "When will things finally be over here?"'"

Bittrich insisted that "we are fighting as we have never fought
before." At Elst, Major Hans Peter Knaust was staving off British tank
and infantry columns trying to proceed up the main highway to Arnhem.
But Knaust could not hold at Elst and also attack west against the
Poles and British at Driel. The moment his heavy

Tigers moved onto the polder they bogged down. The assault toward
Driel was a task for infantry and lighter vehicles, Bittrich explained.
"Model was never interested in excuses," Bittrich says, "but he
understood me. Still, he gave me only twenty-four hours to finish the
British off."

Bittrich drove to Elst to see Knaust. The major was worried. All day
the forces against him had appeared to be growing stronger. While he
knew British tanks could not leave the main highway, the possibility of
attacks from the west concerned him. "A British breakthrough must be
halted at all costs," Bittrich warned. "Can you hold for another
twenty-four hours, while we clean up Oosterbeek?" Knaust assured
Bittrich that he could. Leaving Knaust, the Panzer Corps commander
immediately ordered Colonel Harzer of the Hohenstaufen Division to
"intensify all attacks against the airborne tomorrow. I want the whole
affair ended."

Harzer's problems were also difficult. Although Oosterbeek was
completely encircled, its narrow streets were proving almost impossible
for maneuvering tanks--especially for the 60-ton Tigers, "which tore up
the road foundations, making them look like plowed fields, and ripped
off the pavement when they turned." Additionally, Harzer told
Bittrich, "everytime we compress the airborne pocket and shrink it even
tighter, the British seem to fight harder." Bittrich advised that
"strong attacks should be thrown from east and west at the base of the
perimeter to cut the British off from the Rhine."

The Frundsberg Division commander, General Harmel, charged with holding
and driving back the Allied forces in the Nijmegen-Arnhem area, heard
from Bittrich, too. The assembling of his whole division delayed by
the wreckage on the Arnhem bridge, Harmel had not been able to form a
blocking front on both sides of the elevated "island" highway. The
British attack at Oosterbeek had split his forces. Only part of his
division had been in position on the western side when the British
attacked. Now, what remained of his men and equipment was east of the
highway. Elst would be held, Harmel assured Bittrich. The British
could not advance up the main road. But he was power-

so to halt the drive to Driel. "I cannot prevent them going up or
coming back," he told Bittrich. The II SS Panzer Corps leader was
firm. The next twenty-four hours would be critical, he warned Harmel.
"The British will try everything to reinforce their bridgehead and also
drive for Arnhem." Harzer's attacks against the Oosterbeek perimeter
would succeed--provided that Harmel held. As Bittrich put it, "We'll
get the nail. You must amputate the finger."

The guns of the 43rd were thundering, and in the southwest corner of
the Oosterbeek perimeter a big gasometer blazed, throwing an eerie,
flickering, yellowish light over the Rhine. As he climbed out of a
boat on the northern bank, Colonel Charles Mackenzie could see why he
had been warned by radio to wait for a guide. The shoreline was
unrecognizable; boat wreckage, fallen trees, and shell craters had
buried the road running back into the bridgehead. If he had tried to
set out by himself he would certainly have become lost. Now, following
an engineer, he was guided to the Hartenstein.

Mackenzie had not changed his mind about the report he would make to
Urquhart. Once again, while waiting to be rowed over to the division
perimeter, he had thought about his options. In spite of all the
preparations that he had seen in Driel and on the southern bank, he
remained skeptical that help would ever reach the division in time. He
felt guilty about the report he had decided to make. Yet, there was
still the chance that his own view was far too pessimistic.

In the cellar of the shattered Hartenstein, Urquhart was waiting.
Mackenzie gave the Airborne commander the official view: "Help is on
the way. We should hang on." Urquhart, Mackenzie remembers, "listened
impassively, neither disheartened nor gladdened by the news." The
unspoken question for both men remained the same: How much longer must
they hold? At this time, in the first hours of Sunday, September 24,
after eight days of

battle, Urquhart's estimated strength was down to fewer than 2,500 men.
And for all of them there was only one question: When will Monty's
forces arrive? They had thought about it in the loneliness of
trenches, gunpits and outposts, in the wrecks of houses and shops, and
in the hospitals and dressing stations, where anxious uncomplaining men
lay wounded on pallets, mattresses and bare floors.

With infantry on the south bank of the river, the paratroopers did not
doubt that the Second Army would eventually cross. They wondered only
if any of them would be alive to see the relief for which they had
waited so long. In these last tragic hours annihilation was their
constant fear, and to allay this dread, men tried to raise one
another's morale by any means they could. Jokes made the rounds.
Wounded men, still holding at their posts, disregarded their injuries,
and examples of extraordinary daring were becoming commonplace. Above
all, Urquhart's men were proud. They shared a spirit in those days
that was stronger, they said later, than they would ever know again.

From his kit Lance Bombardier James Jones of an artillery troop took
out the single nonmilitary item he had brought along--the flute he had
used as a boy. "I just wanted to play it again," he remembers. "It
was raining mortar bombs for three or four days straight and I was
frightened to death. I got out the flute and began to play." Nearby,
Lieutenant James Woods, the gun-position officer, had an idea. With
Jones leading, Lieutenant Woods and two other gunners climbed out of
their trenches and began to march around the gun positions. As they
proceeded single file, Lieutenant Woods began to sing. Behind him the
two troopers removed their helmets and drummed on them with sticks.
Battered men heard the strains of "British Grenadiers" and "Scotland
the Brave" filtering softly through the area. Faintly at first, other
men began to sing and then, with Woods "going at the top of his voice,"
the artillery positions erupted in song.

In the Schoonoord Hotel on the Utrecht-Arnhem road, approximately
midway along the eastern side of the perimeter, Dutch volunteers and
British medics cared for hundreds of wounded

under the watchful eyes of German guards. Hendrika van der Vlist wrote
in her diary:

Sunday, September 24. This is the day of the Lord. War rages outside.
The building is shaking. That is why the doctors cannot operate or
fix casts. We cannot wash the wounded because nobody can venture out
to find water under these conditions. The army chaplain scribbles in
his notebook. I ask him what time the service will be held.

Padre G. A. Pare finished his notes. With Hendrika he made the rounds
of all the rooms in the hotel. The shelling seemed "particularly
noisy," he recalls, "and I could hardly hear my own voice above the
battle outside." Yet, "looking into the faces of men stretched out all
over the floor," Chaplain Pare "felt inspired to fight the noise
outside with God's peace inside." Quoting from St. Matthew, Pare
said, ""Take no thought for the morrow. What ye shall eat or what ye
shall drink, or where withal ye shall be clothed."" Then he, like the
men in the artillery positions, began to sing. As he began "Abide With
Me," men just listened. Then they began to hum and sing softly
themselves. Against the thunderous barrage outside the Schoonoord,
hundreds of wounded and dying men took up the words, ""When other
helpers fail and comforts flee, God of the helpless, O abide with
me.""

Across the street from the church in lower Oosterbeek, Kate ter Horst
left her five children and the eleven other civilians sheltering in the
ten-by-six-foot cellar of her house and made her way past the wounded
on the upper floor. The fourteen-room, 200-year-old house, a former
vicarage, was totally unrecognizable. The windows were gone and "every
foot of space in the main hall, dining room, study, garden room,
bedrooms, corridors, kitchen, boiler room and attic was crowded with
wounded," Mrs. ter Horst recalls. They lay, too, in the garage and
even under the stairs. In all, more than three hundred injured men
crowded the house and grounds, and others were being brought in by the
minute. Outdoors on this Sunday morning Kate ter Horst saw that a haze
hung over the battlefield. "The sky is yellow," she wrote, "and there
are dark clouds hanging down like wet rags.

The earth has been torn open." On the grounds she saw "the dead, our
dead, wet through from rain, and stiff. Lying on their faces, just as
they were yesterday and the day before--the man with the tousled beard
and the one with the black face and many, many others." Eventually,
fifty-seven men would be buried in the garden, "one of them a mere
boy," Mrs. ter Horst wrote, "who died inside the house for lack of
space." The lone doctor among the medical teams in the house, Captain
Randall Martin, had told Mrs. ter Horst that the boy "had simply
banged his head against a radiator until he was gone."

Picking her way gingerly about the rooms, Kate ter Horst thought of her
husband, Jan, who had left on Tuesday night by bicycle to scout the
area and bring back information about German positions to an artillery
officer. The perimeter had been formed while he was gone and, in the
heavy fighting, Jan was unable to get back home. They would not see
each other for two more weeks. Working with Dr. Martin and the
orderlies ever since Wednesday, Mrs. ter Horst had hardly slept.
Going from room to room, she prayed with the wounded and read to them
from the 91/ Psalm, "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night,
nor for the arrow that flieth by day."

Now, all this morning, snipers, infiltrating into the perimeter during
the night, were firing "shamelessly into a house from which never a
shot was fired," she wrote. "Bullets whizzed through rooms and
corridors crowded with helpless people." Carrying a stretcher past a
window, two orderlies were shot. Then, what everyone feared most might
happen occurred: Dr. Martin was wounded. "It's only my ankle," he
told Mrs. ter Horst. "In the afternoon I'll go hopping around
again."

Outside the sniping gave way to shelling. The thunder and crash of
mortar bursts "defies description," Kate ter Horst recorded. To
Private Michael Growe, "the lady seemed terribly calm and unflustered."
Growe, already wounded in the thigh from shrapnel, was now hit again
in the left foot by a shell burst. Hastily medics moved Growe and
other newly injured men away from a line of French windows.

Corporal Daniel Morgans, hit in the head and right knee as he was
holding a position near the Oosterbeek church, was carried to the Ter
Horst house just as a German tank came up the road. As an orderly was
explaining to Morgans that "they were practically out of dressings and
had no anesthetics or food, and only a little water," the tank sent a
shell crashing against the house. In an upstairs room, Private Walter
Boldock, with bullet wounds in the side and back, stared in horror as
the tank "ground and wheeled. I could hear the gibberish chatter of
machine guns and then a shell tore through the wall above my back.
Plaster and debris began falling everywhere and many of the wounded
were killed." Downstairs Bombardier E. C. Bolden, a medical orderly,
was in a white-hot rage. Grabbing a Red Cross flag, he rushed out of
the house and straight for the tank. Corporal Morgans heard him
clearly. "What the hell are you doing?" Bolden screamed at the German
tank commander. "This house is clearly marked with a Red Cross flag.
Get the hell away from here!" As the anxious wounded listened, they
heard the sound of the tank backing off. Bolden returned to the house,
"almost as angry," Morgans remembers, "as when he left. We asked him
what happened." Bolden replied tersely: "The German apologized but he
also got the hell out."

Although the house was not shelled again, there was no letup in the
fire about them. Kate ter Horst wrote: "All around these men are
dying. Must they breathe their last in such a hurricane? Oh, God!
Give us a moment's silence. Give us quiet, if only for a short moment,
so that they at least can die. Grant them a moment's holy silence
while they pass on to Eternity."

All about the perimeter, tanks crashed through defenses as weary,
groggy troopers reached the limits of exhaustion. There were horrors
everywhere --particularly from flamethrowers. In one incident of SS
brutality, a jeep carrying wounded under a Red Cross flag was stopped
by four Germans. One of the medics tried to explain that he was
carrying wounded to a casualty station. The Germans turned a
flamethrower on him, then walked

away. But throughout the battle, both at the Arnhem bridge and in the
perimeter, there were singular examples of chivalry.

On Brigadier Hackett's eastern perimeter defenses a German officer
drove up to the British positions under a white flag and asked to see
the commander. Hackett met him and learned that the Germans "were
about to attack, first laying down mortar and artillery fire on my
forward positions." As the Germans knew that one of the casualty
stations was in the line of attack, Hackett was requested to move his
forward positions back 600 yards. "We do not want to put down a
barrage that will hit the wounded," the German explained. Hackett knew
he could not comply. "If the line had been moved back the distance
demanded by the Germans," General Urquhart later wrote, "it would have
put Divisional headquarters 200 yards behind the German lines."
Despite his inability to move, Hackett noted that when the attack
finally came the barrage was carefully laid down to the south of the
casualty station.

At the Tafelberg, another doctor, Major Guy Rigby-Jones, who had been
operating on a billiard table in the game room of the hotel, lost all
his equipment when an 88 shell came through the roof of the building.
He had not been able to operate since Thursday, although one of the
field ambulance teams had set up a theater in the Petersburg Hotel.
"We had 1,200 to 1,300 casualties and neither the nursing facilities
nor the staff to properly treat them," he remembers. "All we had was
morphia to kill the pain. Our main problem was food and water. We had
already drained the central heating system to get water, but now,
having ceased operating, I became more or less a quartermaster, trying
to feed the wounded." One of them, Major John Waddy of the 156th
Battalion, shot in the groin by a sniper on Tuesday, had been wounded
again. A mortar shell landing on the window sill of a large bay window
exploded and a shell fragment embedded itself in Waddy's left foot.
Then the room took a direct hit. Waddy's right shoulder, face and chin
were lacerated by falling bricks and wood splinters. Dr. Graeme
Warrack, the division's chief medical

officer, whose headquarters were at the Tafelberg, rushed outside.
Waddy hauled himself up to see Warrack standing in the street shouting
at the Germans: "You bloody bastards! Can't anybody recognize a Red
Cross?"

The Van Maanen family--Anje, her brother Paul and her aunt--were
working around the clock in the Tafelberg, under direction of Dr. van
Maanen. Paul, who was a medical student, remembers that "Sunday was
terrible. We seemed to be hit all the time. I remembered that we
mustn't show fear in front of the patients, but I was ready to jump out
of the room and scream. I didn't, because the wounded stayed so calm."
As injured men were carried from one damaged room to another, Paul
remembers that "we began to sing. We sang for the British, for the
Germans, for ourselves. Then everyone seemed to be doing it and with
all the emotion people would stop because they were crying, but they
would start up again."

For young Anje van Maanen, the romantic dream of liberation by the
bright stalwart young men who had dropped from the skies was ending in
despair. Many Dutch civilians brought to the Tafelberg had died of
their wounds; two, Anje noted in her diary, were "lovely girls and good
skaters, as old as I am, just seventeen. Now I will never see them
again." To Anje the hotel now seemed to be constantly hit by shells.
In the cellar she began to cry. "I am afraid to die," she wrote. "The
explosions are enormous and every shell kills. How can God allow this
hell?"

By 9:30 A.m. on Sunday morning Dr. Warrack decided to do something
about the hell. The nine casualty stations and hospitals in the area
were so jammed with wounded from both sides that he began to feel that
"the battle could no longer continue in this fashion." Medical teams
"were working under impossible conditions, some without surgical
instruments." And under the intensified German attacks, casualties
were steadily mounting--among them now the courageous Brigadier Shan
Hackett, who suffered severe leg and stomach wounds from a mortar-shell
burst shortly before 8 A.m.

Warrack had determined on a plan which needed General

Urquhart's consent, and he set out for the Hartenstein. "I told the
General," Warrack says, "that despite Red Cross flags, all the
hospitals were being shelled. One had taken six hits and was set
afire, forcing us to quickly evacuate a hundred fifty injured." The
wounded, he said, were being "badly knocked about, and the time had
come to make some sort of arrangement with the Germans." As it was
quite impossible to evacuate wounded across the Rhine, Warrack believed
that many lives would be saved "if casualties were handed over to the
Germans for treatment in their hospitals in Arnhem."

Urquhart, Warrack recalls, "seemed resigned." He agreed to the plan.
But under no circumstances, he warned Warrack, "must the enemy be
allowed to think that this was the beginning of a crack in the
formation's position." Warrack was to make clear to the Germans that
the step was being taken solely on humane grounds. Negotiations could
take place, Urquhart said, "on condition that the Germans understand
you are a doctor representing your patients, not an official emissary
from the division." Warrack was permitted to ask for a truce period
during the afternoon so that the battlefield could be cleared of
wounded before "both sides got on with the fight."

Warrack hurried off to find Lieutenant Commander Arnnoldus Wolters, the
Dutch liaison officer, and Dr. Gerritt van Maanen, both of whom he
asked to help in the negotiations. Because Wolters, who would act as
interpreter, was in the Dutch military and "might run a great risk
going to a German headquarters," Warrack gave him the pseudonym
"Johnson." The three men quickly headed for the Schoonoord Hotel to
contact the German division medical officer.

By coincidence, that officer, twenty-nine-year-old Major Egon Skalka,
claims he had reached the same conclusion as Warrack. As Skalka
recalls that Sunday morning, he felt "something had to be done not only
for our wounded but the British in der Hexenkessel. In the Schoonoord
Hotel "casualties lay everywhere--even on the floor." According to
Skalka, he had come to see "the British chief medical officer to
suggest a battlefield clearing" before

Warrack arrived. Whoever first had the idea, they did meet. Warrack's
impression of the young German doctor was that "he was effeminate in
appearance, but sympathetic and apparently quite anxious to ingratiate
himself with the British--just in case." Confronting the slender,
dapper officer, handsome in his finely cut uniform, Warrack, with
"Johnson" interpreting, made his proposal. As they talked, Skalka
studied Warrack, "a tall, lanky, dark-haired fellow, phlegmatic like
all Englishmen. He seemed terribly tired but otherwise not in bad
shape." Skalka was prepared to agree to the evacuation plan, but, he
told Warrack, "first we will have to go to my headquarters to make sure
there are no objections from my General." Skalka refused to take Dr.
van Maanen with them. In a captured British jeep, Skalka, Warrack and
"Johnson" set out for Arnhem with Skalka driving. Skalka recalls that
he "drove very fast, zigzagging back and forth. I did not want Warrack
to orient himself and he would have had a tough time of it the way I
drove. We went very fast, part of the time under fire, and twisted and
turned into the city."

To Wolters, the short drive into Arnhem was "sad and miserable."
Wreckage lay everywhere. Houses were still smoking or in ruins. Some
of the roads they followed, chewed up by tank tracks and cratered by
shellfire, "looked like plowed fields." Wrecked guns, overturned
jeeps, charred armored vehicles and "the crumpled bodies of the dead"
lay like a trail all the way into Arnhem. Skalka had not blindfolded
the two men, nor did Wolters feel he made any attempt to conceal the
route he took. It struck him that the elegant SS medical officer
seemed "eager for us to see the German strength." Through the
still-smoking, debris-strewn streets of Arnhem, Skalka drove northeast
and pulled up outside Lieutenant Colonel Harzer's headquarters, the
high school on Hezelbergherweg.

Although the arrival of Warrack and Wolters created surprise among the
staff officers, Harzer, alerted by phone, was waiting for them.
Skalka, leaving the two officers in an outer room, reported to his
commander. Harzer was angry. "I was amazed," he says, "that Skalka
had not blindfolded them. Now they knew the exact

location of my headquarters." Skalka had laughed. "The way I drove I
would be very surprised if they could find their way anywhere," he
assured Harzer.

The two Germans sat down with the British emissaries. "The medical
officer proposed that his British wounded be evacuated from the
perimeter since they no longer had the room or supplies to care for
them," Harzer says. "It meant calling a truce for a couple of hours.
I told him I was sorry our countries were fighting. Why should we
fight, after all? I agreed to his proposal."

Wolters--"a Canadian soldier named Johnson," as Warrack introduced
him-- remembers the conference in a completely different context. "At
first the German SS colonel refused to even consider a truce," he says.
"There were several other staff officers in the room, including the
acting chief of staff, Captain Schwarz, who finally turned to Harzer
and said that the whole matter would have to be taken up with the
General." The Germans left the room. "As we waited," Wolters says,
"we were offered sandwiches and brandy. Warrack warned me not to drink
on an empty stomach. Whatever kind of filling was in the sandwiches
was covered with sliced onions."

As the Germans reentered the room, "everyone snapped to attention and
there was much "Heil Hitlering."" General Bittrich, hatless, in his
long black leather coat, came in. "He stayed only a moment," Wolters
remembers. Studying the two men, Bittrich said, "Ich bedauere sehr
diesen Krieg zwischen unseren Vaterl@andern" (i regret this war between
our two nations). The General listened quietly to Warrack's evacuation
plan and gave his consent. "I agreed," Bittrich says, "because a man
cannot--provided, of course, that he has such feelings to start
with--lose all humanity, even during the most bitter fight." Then
Bittrich handed Warrack a bottle of brandy. "This is for your
General," he told Warrack, and he withdrew.

By 10:30 A.m. Sunday, agreement on the partial truce was reached,
although Wolters recollects "that the Germans seemed worried. Both the
Tafelberg and the Schoonoord hotels were sitting on the front lines and
the Germans could not guarantee to

stop mortaring and shelling." Harzer was mainly concerned about the
long-range shelling of the British south of the Rhine and whether it
could be controlled during the casualty evacuation. Skalka says that
after assurances had been given on this point, he received a radio
message from British Second Army headquarters. "It was simply
addressed to the medical officer, 9th SS Panzer Division, thanking me
and asking if a cease-fire could extend long enough for the British to
bring up medical supplies, drugs and bandages from across the Rhine."
Skalka radioed back, "We do not need your help but request only that
your air force refrain from bombing our Red Cross trucks continually."
He was answered immediately: "Unfortunately, such attacks occur on both
sides." Skalka thought the message "ridiculous." Angrily he replied,
"Sorry, but I have not seen our air force in two years." Back came the
British message: "Just stick to the agreement." Skalka was now
enraged, so much so, he claims, that he radioed back, "Lick my ----" *
* Skalka's account that some exchange of messages took place is
probably true. Yet the wording of the messages is certainly
questionable, especially his answer regarding the Luftwaffe, which was
in the air during the week, harassing the British drops. Further, it
is a belittlement of forces of his own country. Such a contemptuous
assessment of one's own side to an enemy was certainly uncommon among
the SS.

The arrangement, as finally worked out, called for a two-hour truce
beginning at 3 P.m. The wounded would leave the perimeter by a
designated route near the Tafelberg Hotel. Every effort was to be made
"to slacken fire or stop completely." Troops on both sides holding
front-line positions were warned to hold their fire. As Skalka began
to order "every available ambulance and jeep to assemble behind the
front lines," Warrack and Wolters, about to head back to their own
lines, were allowed to fill their pockets with morphia and medical
supplies. Wolters "was glad to get out of there, especially from the
moment Schwarz said to me, "You don't speak German like a
Britisher.""

En route back to the perimeter, a Red Cross flag flying from their jeep
and escorted by another German medical officer, Warrack and Wolters
were permitted to stop at St. Elisabeth's Hospi-

tal to inspect conditions and visit the British wounded--among them
Brigadier Lathbury, who, with badges of rank removed, was now "Lance
Corporal" Lathbury. They were greeted by the chief British medical
officer, Captain Lipmann Kessel; the head of the surgical team, Major
Cedric Longland; and the senior Dutch surgeon, Dr. van Hengel-- all of
whom, Warrack remembers, "were desperately anxious for news." Heavy
fighting had taken place about the hospital. At one point there had
even been a pitched battle in the building with Germans firing over the
heads of patients in the wards, Kessel reported. But since Thursday
the area had been quiet and Warrack discovered that, in contrast to the
harrowing ordeal of the wounded in the perimeter, in St. Elisabeth's
"British casualties were in beds with blankets and sheets, and well
cared for by Dutch nuns and doctors." Warning Kessel to be prepared
for a heavy flow of casualties, the two men returned to Oosterbeek,
just in time, Warrack recalls, "to step into a packet of mortaring near
the Tafelberg."

At 3 P.m. the partial truce began. The firing suddenly diminished and
then stopped altogether. Lance Bombardier Percy Parkes, for whom the
"overwhelming noise had become normal, found the silence so unreal that
for a second I thought I was dead." With British and German medical
officers and orderlies supervising the moves, ambulances and jeeps from
both sides began loading casualties. Sergeant Dudley R. Pearson, the
4th Parachute Brigade's chief clerk, was put beside his Brigadier's
stretcher on a jeep. "So you got it too, Pearson," said Hackett.
Pearson was wearing only his boots and trousers. His right shoulder
was heavily bandaged "where shrapnel had torn a huge hole." Hackett
was gray-faced and obviously in great pain from his stomach wound. As
they moved off toward Arnhem, Hackett said, "Pearson, I hope you won't
think I'm pulling rank, but I think I'm a bit worse off than you are.
At the hospital do you mind if they get to me first?" * * Both
Lathbury and Hackett became "lance corporals" in the hospital.
Sergeant Dave Morris, who gave blood to Hackett before his operation,
was cautioned that the Brigadier's identity was not to be revealed,
Lathbury, in the hospital since the nineteenth, got his first news of
the division when the Oosterbeek wounded arrived--including the
information that Urquhart had been able to rejoin the division and that
Frost's men had held the Arnhem bridge for almost four days. Both
brigadiers later escaped from the hospital with the help of the Dutch
and hid out. Lathbury eventually joined the irrepressible Major Digby
Tatham-Warter, who, dressed in civilian clothes and working with the
Dutch underground, "went about quite openly and on one occasion helped
to push a German staff car out of a ditch." With a group of
approximately 120 troopers, medics and pilots who had been hidden by
the Dutch, and led by a Dutch guide, Lathbury reached American troops
south of the Rhine on the evening of October 22. The incredible
Tatham-Warter helped about 150 British soldiers to escape.
Incidentally, it took the author seven years to discover his
whereabouts-- then by accident. My British publisher met him in Kenya
where he has been living since the end of the war. Tatham-Warter says
that he "carried the umbrella in battle more for identification
purposes than for anything else, because I was always forgetting the
password."

Lieutenant Pat Glover, who had jumped with Myrtle the "parachick," was
moved to St. Elisabeth's in agony. A bullet had severed two veins in
his right hand and on the way to the Schoonoord dressing station he was
hit again by shrapnel in the right calf. There was so little morphia
that he was told he could not be given a shot unless he deemed it
absolutely necessary. Glover did not ask for any. Now, sleeping
fitfully, he found himself thinking of Myrtle. He could not remember
what day she had been killed. During the fighting he and his batman,
Private Joe Scott, had traded Myrtle's satchel back and forth. Then,
in a slit trench under fire, Glover suddenly realized that Myrtle's bag
was not there. "Where's Myrtle?" he had yelled to Scott. "She's up
there, sir." Scott pointed to the top of Glover's trench. Inside her
bag, Myrtle lay on her back, feet in the air. During the night Glover
and Scott buried the chicken in a shallow little grave near a hedge.
As Scott brushed earth over the spot, he looked at Glover and said,
"Well, Myrtle was game to the last, sir." Glover remembered he had not
taken off Myrtle's parachute wings. Now, in a haze of pain, he was
glad that he had buried her with honor and properly--with her badge of
rank--as befitted those who died in action.

At the Schoonoord, Hendrika van der Vlist watched as German orderlies
began to move casualties out. Suddenly firing began. One of the
Germans yelled, "If it does not stop we will open fire and not a
casualty, a doctor or a nurse will come out alive." Hendrika paid no
attention. "It is always the youngest soldiers

who yell the loudest," she noted, "and we're used to the German threats
by now." The firing ceased and the loading continued.

Several times again firing broke out as the long lines of walking
wounded and convoys of jeeps, ambulances and trucks moved out toward
Arnhem. "Inevitably," General Urquhart recalled, "there were
misunderstandings. It is not easy to still a battle temporarily."
Doctors at the Tafelberg had "some uneasy moments as they cleared
combative Germans off the premises." And nearly everyone remembers
that the recently arrived Poles could not understand the necessity for
the partial cease-fire. "They had many old scores to settle," says
Urquhart, "and saw no legitimate reason for holding their fire."
Ultimately, they were "prevailed upon to curb their eagerness until the
evacuation was completed."

Major Skalka, along with Dr. Warrack, kept the convoys moving
throughout the afternoon. Some 200 walking wounded were led out and
more than 250 men were carried in the medical convoys. "I have never
seen anything like the conditions at Oosterbeek," Skalka says. "It was
nothing but death and wreckage."

At St. Elisabeth's, Lieutenant Peter Stainforth, recovering from a
chest wound received in Arnhem, heard the first walking wounded coming
in. "I felt a shiver of excitement run up my spine," he says. "I have
never been so proud. They came in and the rest of us were
horror-stricken. Every man had a week's growth of beard. Their battle
dress was torn and stained; and filthy, blood-soaked bandages poked out
from all of them. The most compelling thing was their
eyes--red-rimmed, deep-sunk, peering out from drawn, mud-caked faces
made haggard by lack of sleep, and yet they walked in undefeated. They
looked fierce enough to take over the place right then and there."

As the last convoy left Oosterbeek, Warrack thanked the SS medical
officer for his help. "Skalka looked me in the eye and said, "Can I
have that in writing?"'" Warrack ignored the remark. At 5 P.m. the
battle began again as though it had never stopped.

At Lance Bombardier Percy Parkes's gun position near the Dolderen
laundry, "all hell broke loose again. The Jerries threw

everything at us." After the relative quiet during the evacuation of
the wounded, Parkes felt a sense of relief. "Everything had returned
to normal, and I could orient to that. I was back in business again."
Germans, taking advantage of the temporary truce, had infiltrated many
areas. Men heard screaming and firing from all directions as Germans
and British chased one another through streets and gardens. From his
trench Parkes saw a tank coming across a cabbage patch toward battery
headquarters. Two artillerymen sprinted for a 6-pounder on the road.
As the troopers began to fire, Parkes looked up in amazement as
cabbages began to sail over his trench. "The force of the gun was
sucking up the cabbages, pulling them right out of the ground and
hurling them through the air. Then there was a tremendous bang and we
saw a shell hit the tank."

Major Robert Cain heard someone yell, "Tigers!" and he raced for the
small antitank gun set up alongside a building in his block. A gunner
ran up the street to help him. Together the two men rolled the gun
into position. "Fire!" Cain shouted. He saw that the shell had hit
the tank, disabling it. "Let's have another go to be sure," he yelled.
The gunner looked at Cain and shook his head. "Can't, sir," he said.
"She's finished. The recoil mechanism's gone."

Inside the Ter Horst house the noise was so loud that everyone was
numbed and deafened. Suddenly Kate ter Horst felt "a tremendous shock.
There was a thunder of bricks. Timbers cracked and there were stifled
cries from all sides." The force of the explosion had jammed the
cellar door. In the choking dust that swirled through the little room,
she heard "men working with spades and tools ... sawing and the
breaking of timbers ... footsteps crunching through bricks and mortar
... and heavy things dragged back and forth." The cellar door was
broken open and fresh air poured in. Upstairs Kate saw that part of
the corridor and the garden room were open to the outdoors and a
section of one wall had been blown in. Men lay everywhere, tossed
about by the explosion. Dr. Martin had been hit again and was unable
to get about at all. A soldier who had been brought in

several days earlier suffering from shell shock roamed through the
carnage in the house. Staring at Kate ter Horst, he said, "I think
I've seen you someplace before." Gently she led him to the cellar and
found room for him on the stone floor. Almost immediately he fell
asleep. Wakening later, he moved over to Mrs. ter Horst. "We can be
taken at any moment now," he said quietly. He went to sleep again.
Leaning tiredly against a wall, her five children beside her, Kate
waited, as "the ghastly hours stretched slowly."

In a trench not far from Major Cain's position, Sergeant Alf Roullier
saw another tank appear in the street. He and a gunner dashed to the
only antitank gun that seemed to be left in the artillery troop he was
with. The two men reached the gun just as the tank turned toward them.
They fired and saw a flash as the tank was hit. At that moment a
machine gun opened up. The gunner with Roullier gasped and sagged
against him. As Roullier turned to ease the man down, a bullet tore
into his left hand. It began to shake uncontrollably and Roullier
assumed the bullet had hit a nerve. Easing the gunner over his back,
Roullier made it to his trench. "I'll go get help," he told the
bloodstained trooper. At the Ter Horst house Roullier stopped,
unwilling to go in. He heard men screaming and babbling, begging for
water, crying out the names of relatives. "Oh, God!" Roullier said.
"What have I come here for?" Bombardier E. C. Bolden appeared at that
moment. "Blimey, mate," Bolden said, looking at Roullier's shaking
hand, "you been out typewriting?" Roullier explained that he had come
for help for the wounded gunner. "All right," Bolden said, bandaging
Roullier's hand, "I'll get there." Returning to his position, Roullier
passed the Ter Horst garden and stopped, staring in horror. He had
never seen so many dead in one place before. Some had smocks over
their faces but others were uncovered and "their eyes stared off in all
directions." There were piles of dead, so many that a man could not
step between them.

At the trench Roullier waited until Bolden arrived with two
stretcher-bearers. "Don't worry," Bolden told Roullier. He raised his
thumb. "Everything will be O.k." Roullier didn't think so. Back in
England, the thirty-one-year-old trooper had pleaded to

go on the mission. His age was against it, and although Roullier was
an artilleryman, he had become acting mess sergeant. But he had won
out, and finally had been allowed to go. Now, staring at the tired,
thirsty, hungry troopers around him, he remembers that "something
clicked in my mind. I just forgot the battle. I was obsessed with
getting us something to eat." He does not know how long he crawled
through torn-up gardens and half-demolished houses in the area,
ransacking shelves and searching cellars for bits and pieces of food.
Someplace he found an undamaged galvanized tub. Into it he threw
everything he found--a few withered carrots, some onions, a bag of
potatoes, salt and some bouillon cubes. Near the house he found a
chicken coop. Only one bird was still alive. Roullier took it
along.

On the stone floor of a ruined house he built a circle of bricks to
hold the tub. Tearing strips of wallpaper off walls and using pieces
of wood, he built a fire. He does not remember the battle still raging
in the streets as he made one more trip outside to find water--but he
staggered back with the tub partly filled. He killed and plucked the
chicken, and dropped it into the tub. Just at dusk when he decided the
stew was finished he pulled a pair of curtains off a window frame to
wrap the hot handles of the pot and, with the help of another trooper,
set out for the trenches. For the first time in hours he was aware of
mortars coming in. The two men moved at intervals, stopping at each
near burst, then going on again. At the artillery position, Roullier
yelled out, "Come and get it!" Amazed, bleary troopers appeared in
cautious groups with battered ration cans and mess kits. Dazedly
mumbling their thanks, they dipped into the hot tub and disappeared
into the growing darkness. In ten minutes the stew was gone. Peering
into the bottom of the tub, Alf Roullier could just make out a few
small chunks of potatoes. He picked them out and, for the first time
that day, ate some food. He had never felt happier.

On the grounds of the Hartenstein Hotel in a five-man trench, Sergeant
Leonard Overton, the glider pilot, stared out into the growing dusk.
The four men who shared his trench had disappeared. Suddenly Overton
saw dark shapes approaching. "It's

only us," someone said quietly. As the four soldiers dropped into the
trench, Overton saw that they carried a gas cape bundled together.
Carefully the men opened the cape and, holding a can at one edge,
emptied almost a pint of rain water into the container. One man
produced a cube of tea and began to stir the liquid. Overton looked
on, dazed. "We had had nothing to eat or drink that day and only two
hard biscuits which we had shared on Saturday," he says. Then, to
Overton's surprise, the troopers offered the tin can to him. He took a
sip and passed it on. "Many happy returns," each man told him softly.
Overton had forgotten that Sunday, September 24, was his twenty-third
birthday.

In the Schoonoord the critical cases and the walking wounded were gone,
but shell-shocked men still lingered in the big hotel. As Chaplain
Pare walked through a half-deserted room, he heard a thin shaking voice
somewhere in the echoing building singing "Just a song at twilight."
Climbing to an upstairs room, Pare knelt beside a badly shocked young
trooper. "Padre," the boy said, "will you tuck me in? I get so
frightened with all the noise." Pare had no blanket but he pretended
to cover the trooper. "That feels fine, Padre. I feel very well now.
Will you do me one more favor?" Pare nodded. "Say the Lord's Prayer
with me." Pare did. He soothed back the young man's hair. "Now close
your eyes," Pare told him. "Sleep well. God bless you." The trooper
smiled. "Good night, Padre. God bless you." Two hours later a medic
came for Pare. "You know that lad you said the prayers with?" Pare
asked, "What's wrong?" The medic shook his head. "He died just now.
He said to tell you he couldn't stand the noise outside."

As evening set in, Colonel R. Payton-Reid in the KOSB'S area of the
perimeter was not unhappy to see "the twenty-fourth grow to its
melancholy close. The high hopes of early support by the ground forces
was a subject now, by mutual consent, taboo."

Late Sunday night Lieutenant Neville Hay, the Phantom Net operator, was
called into General Urquhart's room in the cellar of the Hartenstein.
"He handed me a long message," Hay says, "and told me when I had
finished encoding it to return it to him. I remember him saying that
perhaps by that time he wouldn't have

to send it." Hay was stunned as he read the message. "What it really
meant was that they had to come and get us or we would be wiped out."
Hay encoded the signal and returned it to Urquhart. "I hoped he
wouldn't have to send it, either," Hay says. As sent out, the message
read:

Urquhart to Browning. Must warn you unless physical contact is made
with us early 25 Sept. consider it unlikely we can hold out long
enough. All ranks now exhausted. Lack of rations, water, ammunition
and weapons with high officer casualty rate. Even slight enemy
offensive action may cause complete disintegration. If this happens
all will be ordered to break toward bridgehead if anything rather than
surrender. Any movement at present in face of enemy impossible. Have
attempted our best and will do so as long as possible. * * Several
versions of this message have appeared in other accounts of the battle.
The one above is the original. Lieutenant Neville Hay retained his
timed Phantom message logs and made them available to me. I am
extremely grateful for his cooperation.

Over two consecutive nights, attempts to move men and supplies into
Urquhart's lodgment had failed. Yet the stubborn XXX Corps commander,
General Horrocks, refused to abandon the effort. If the bridgehead was
to be saved and the relief of Urquhart's men effected, it must take
place this Sunday night. Once again the weather was unfavorable; no
help could be expected from England-based planes flying supply or
support missions. But troops were now in strength in the
Driel-Nijmegen area, and Horrocks--achieving the near-impossible by
driving his entire corps up the narrow, one-tank-wide corridor to his
spear-point on the Rhine--was obsessed by the 400 yards of river that
separated him from the airborne forces. Success was tantalizingly
close. He ordered General Thomas' 43rd Wessex to make one last push:
with the remaining Poles, troops of Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Tilly's
4th Dorsets would assault the river and try to cross into the
bridgehead beginning at 10 P.m.

Tilly's move would be a first step in a wider plan. "If things

went well," Horrocks later wrote, "I hoped to side-slip the 43rd
Division across the Rhine farther to the west and carry out a left hook
against the German force attacking the airborne perimeter." The
alternative was withdrawal. On this eighth day of Market-Garden,
Horrocks obstinately refused to face that choice. Others, however,
were now seriously planning how it might be done.

According to his chief of staff, Brigadier Gordon Walch, the First
Airborne Corps commander, General Browning, now spoke "quite openly
about withdrawing." While the 43rd Wessex was moving up to Driel the
decision had been in the balance, but "as soon as they became stuck,
Browning became convinced we would have to get Urquhart's men out."
The British Second Army commander, General Miles C. Dempsey, had
reached the same conclusion. He had not met with Horrocks since the
beginning of the attack. Now, as time ran out, Dempsey ordered
Horrocks to a meeting down the corridor at St. Oedenrode. In line of
command, Dempsey, on authority from Montgomery, would have the last
word. The agonizing decision would be forced on them by one man--Field
Marshal Model.

As Horrocks drove south to St. Oedenrode, Lieutenant Colonel Tilly of
the 4th Dorsets prepared for the night's river crossing. His battalion
was rushing up to the assembly area in Driel, and assault craft, now
that the corridor was open again, were on the way. Tilly's
instructions were clear. Briefed personally by his brigade commander,
Brigadier Ben Walton, Tilly was told to "broaden the base of the
perimeter." The crossing was to be made at the old ferry site, about a
mile west of Oosterbeek. Once across, the Dorsets were "to hang on
until reinforced." They would travel light, carrying only enough food
and ammunition to last three or four days. As the thirty-five-year-old
Tilly saw it, his men "were a task force leading the way for the whole
of Dempsey's Second Army." He was acutely conscious of the urgent
necessity of reaching Urquhart's men quickly. From all he had learned,
the division was dying by the hour.

On Sunday Tilly had climbed to the spire of a damaged Driel church
three times to observe the area where his troops would

land on the Rhine's northern bank. As the afternoon wore on, at his
orchard headquarters south of Driel, he impatiently awaited the full
arrival of his battalion from the village of Homoet, a few miles
southwest of Driel, and the assault boats being brought up from the
corridor.

Shortly after 6 P.m. Brigadier Ben Walton sent for Tilly. At Walton's
headquarters in a house south of Driel, Tilly expected the brigade
commander to review once more the details of the night's operation.
Instead, Walton told him there had been a change in plan. Word had
been received, Walton said, that "the whole operation--the large-scale
crossing--was off." Tilly's battalion would still cross, but for a
different purpose. Tilly listened with increasing dismay. His men
were to hold the base of the perimeter while Urquhart's 1/ Airborne
Division was withdrawn! He was to take as few men as possible --"only
enough to do the job"; approximately 400 infantry and 20 officers.
Tilly did not need to go; he could detail his second in command, Major
James Grafton, to take his place. Although Tilly replied that he would
"think about it," he had already decided to lead his men over. As he
left Walton's headquarters, Tilly felt that his men were being
sacrificed. Walton had said nothing about getting them back. Yet he
knew that Walton too was helpless to alter the situation. What puzzled
him was what had happened; why had the plan been changed?

The decision to withdraw Urquhart's force-- subject to confirmation by
Montgomery, who was not to finally approve the order until 9:30 A.m.
Monday, September 25--was reached by General Dempsey at the St.
Oedenrode conference with Horrocks and General Browning on Sunday
afternoon. After considering his Corps commander's plan for a
full-scale crossing of the Rhine, Dempsey turned it down. Unlike
Horrocks, Dempsey did not believe the assault could succeed. "No," he
said to Horrocks. "Get them out." Turning to Browning, Dempsey asked,
"Is that all right with you?" Silent and subdued, Browning nodded.
Immediately Dempsey notified General Thomas in Driel. Even as the St.
Oedenrode conference was taking place, the Germans, once

again, severed the corridor north of Veghel. Cut off, Horrocks used an
armored carrier and broke through the German lines to return to his
headquarters at Nijmegen. Field Marshal Model's latest attacks would
keep the corridor closed for more than forty hours.

In Driel, most of Lieutenant Colonel Tilly's battalion had now arrived.
He walked among his troops picking the men he would take. Tapping
soldiers on the shoulder, Tilly said, "You go" ... "You're not going."
The real purpose of the assault was secret. He could not tell
protesting men why they were being left behind. Tilly "picked those
veterans who were absolutely sure--essential--leaving the others
behind."

The decision was bitter. Looking at the officers and men who, he
believed, "were going to certain death," Tilly called over Major
Grafton. "Jimmy," Grafton remembers Tilly saying, "I've got to tell
you something, because someone other than me has to know the real
purpose of the crossing." Outlining the change in plan, Tilly added
quietly, "I'm afraid we're being chucked away."

Stunned, Grafton stared at Tilly. It was vital, Tilly added, that no
one else have the information. "It would be too risky," he
explained.

Grafton knew what Tilly meant. It would be a terrible blow to morale
if the truth was known. As Grafton prepared to leave, Tilly said,
"Jimmy, I hope you can swim." Grafton smiled. "I hope so, too," he
said.

By 9:30 P.m., as Tilly's men moved down to the river, there was still
no sign of the assault craft. "How the hell do they expect me to cross
without boats?" Tilly asked his engineering officer, Lieutenant
Colonel Charles Henniker. Rations for his men had not arrived either.
Testy and burdened by his knowledge of the true reason for the mission,
Tilly spoke with Lieutenant Colonel Aubrey Coad, commander of the 5th
Dorsets. "Nothing's right," Tilly told him. "The boats haven't come
and we haven't been issued rations. If something isn't done soon, I'm
not prepared to go." Coad ordered his battalion to turn over rations
to Tilly's men.

For three long hours, in a cold, drizzling rain, Tilly's force waited
for the assault craft. At midnight word arrived that the boats were
now in Driel. But only nine had come through. In the darkness, some
trucks had taken a wrong turn and driven into enemy lines; two others,
skidding off a muddy dike road, had been lost. At the rendezvous point
the boats were carried on the shoulders of the infantry for 600 yards
through a swampy marsh to the launching point. Stumbling and
slithering over the mud of the polder, the men took more than an hour
to wrestle the boats to the river. Not until after 2 A.m. on Monday,
September 25, was the assembly complete.

As the men prepared to launch, Tilly handed Major Grafton two messages
for General Urquhart: one was a letter from General Browning; the
other, a coded message from General Thomas outlining the withdrawal
plan. There were two sets of these letters. Lieutenant Colonel Eddie
Myers, Urquhart's engineering officer, had returned from Nijmegen and
his meeting with Browning. Now Myers, bearing the same letters, was
waiting to cross. "Your job," Tilly told Grafton, "is to get through
to Urquhart with these messages in case the engineering officer doesn't
make it." The paper containing the withdrawal plan was "absolutely
vital," Tilly stressed.

At the river it was clear that the Germans were completely prepared for
another crossing. Only some fifteen British assault craft-- including
three DUKW'S and the remnants of the little fleet used on the previous
night--remained. At the very last minute, because of the boat
shortage, it was decided to halt a diversionary crossing scheduled by
the Poles to the east of the Dorsets' launching area--and put Tilly's
men over in five three-boat waves. As the preparations went on, mortar
shells exploded on the southern bank, and heavy machine guns,
apparently now carefully lined up along both edges of the perimeter
base, swept the water. Lieutenant Colonel Tilly stepped into a boat.
The first wave began to cross.

Although every available British gun on the southern side hammered
away, sending a canopy of shells above the Dorsets,

the crossing was brutally assaulted. The canvas-and-plywood craft were
raked, holed and swept away. Some, like Major Grafton's, caught fire
before leaving the south bank. Quickly Grafton set out in another.
Halfway over he discovered his was the only remaining boat in the wave.
In fifteen minutes, feeling "lucky to be alive," Grafton was across.

In the rain and darkness, hemmed in by well-sited machine-gnn fire,
each of the five waves sustained heavy losses. But the worst enemy by
far was the current. Unused to the boats and the unexpected current,
which increased in speed after midnight, the helpless Dorsets were
swept past the perimeter base and into the hands of the enemy.
Scattered for miles, those who survived were quickly cut off and
surrounded. Of the 420 officers and men who set out for the perimeter,
only 239 reached the northern bank. Lieutenant Colonel Tilly, who upon
landing was met by an avalanche of grenades rolled like bowling balls
down a hill, was heard leading his men out of the inferno, yelling "Get
them with the bayonet!" * * One of the bouncing grenades actually hit
Tilly's head and exploded. Incredibly he was only slightly wounded and
survived as a prisoner of war until the end of hostilities.

The Dorsets were unable to link up as an effective unit with Urquhart's
men. Only a few reached the Hartenstein perimeter, among them Major
Grafton, who, with the withdrawal plan intact, came in through Major
Dickie Lonsdale's positions near the lower Oosterbeek church.
Lieutenant Colonel Myers had already arrived at Urquhart's headquarters
with the documents he was carrying. Neither man knew the contents of
Thomas' coded message, or its cruelly ironic name. When Montgomery had
originally pressed Eisenhower for "a powerful and full-blooded thrust
toward Berlin ... to thus end the war," his single-thrust suggestion
had been turned down. "Operation Market-Garden" had been the
compromise. Now the withdrawal plan for Urquhart's bloodied men had
been officially designated. The remnants of the British 1/ Airborne
Division were to be evacuated under the code name "Operation Berlin."

Now Market-Garden, the operation Montgomery hoped would end the war
quickly, proceeded inexorably toward its doom. For sixty terrible
miles men hung on to bridges and fought for a single road, the
corridor. In General Maxwell Taylor's sector north of Eindhoven,
troopers bolstered by British armor and infantry repelled one fierce
attack after another while trying to reopen the empty stretch of
highway severed at Uden; in General Gavin's 82nd area the great Waal
bridge was under constant bombardment and the enemy continued to press
in from the Beichswald in steadily growing strength. Gone was the
attitude of a week before, that the war was almost over. Enemy units
were being encountered that had long been written off. The Nazi war
machine, thought to be reeling and on the verge of collapse in the
first week of September, had miraculously produced sixty Tiger tanks,
which were delivered to Model on the morning of September 24. *
Market-Garden was strangling, and now the principal objective of the
plan, the foothold across the Rhine, the springboard to the Ruhr, was
to be abandoned. At 6:05 A.m., Monday, September 25, General Urquhart
received the order to withdraw. * "The tanks arrived in the early
hours of the morning," notes General Harmel in Annex No. 6 of his war
diary, September 24th, adding that "II Panzer Corps headquarters
allocated the bulk of this detachment, 45 tiger tanks, to the 10th SS
Frundsberg Division."

In the planning of the Arnhem operation Urquhart had been promised
relief within forty-eight hours. General Browning had expected the 1/
Airborne Division to hold out alone for no longer than four days at
maximum. In an unprecedented feat of arms for

an airborne division, outnumbered and outgunned, Urquhart's men had
hung on for more than twice that long. To the courageous Scot,
commanding an airborne division for the first time, withdrawal was
bitter; yet Urquhart knew it was the only course. By now his strength
was fewer than 2,500 men, and he could ask no more of these
uncompromising troopers. Galling as it was to know that relieving
British forces sat barely one mile away, separated from the division
only by the width of the Rhine, Urquhart reluctantly agreed with his
superiors' decision. The time had come to get the valiant men of
Arnhem out.

At the Hartenstein, a weary Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Myers delivered
the two letters --Browning's and the withdrawal order from General
Thomas--to Urquhart. Browning's congratulatory and encouraging
message, written more than twenty-four hours earlier, was outdated. In
part it read, "... the army is pouring to your assistance, but ... very
late in the day," and "I naturally feel, not so tired and frustrated as
you do, but probably almost worse about the whole thing than you do
..."

The withdrawal order--especially coming from Thomas, whose slowness
Urquhart, like Browning, could not forgive--was by far the more
depressing. The 43rd Wessex was now beginning to feel the weight of
increasing German pressure, Thomas' message said. All hope of
developing a major bridgehead across the Rhine must be abandoned; and
the withdrawal of the 1/ Airborne would take place, by mutual agreement
between Urquhart and Thomas, at a designated date and time.

Urquhart pondered his decision. As he listened to the continuing
mortar and artillery bombardment outside, he had no doubts about the
date and time. If any of his men were to survive, the withdrawal would
have to be soon and, obviously, under cover of darkness. At 8:08 A.m.
Urquhart contacted General Thomas by radio: "Operation Berlin," he told
him, "must be tonight."

Some twenty minutes later Urquhart released the message prepared for
Browning that he had given Lieutenant Neville Hay to encode the night
before. It was still pertinent, particularly the

warning sentence, "Even slight 574-576 enemy offensive action may cause
complete disintegration." For at this moment Urquhart's situation was
so desperate that he did not know whether his men could hold until
darkness. Then the agonized general began to plan the most difficult
maneuver of all: the withdrawal. There was only one way out--across
the terrible 400 yards of the Rhine to Driel.

Urquhart's plan was designed along the lines of another classic British
withdrawal-- Gallipoli, in 1916. There, after months of fighting,
troops had finally been pulled out under deceptive cover. Thinned-out
lines cloaking the retreat had continued to fire as the main bulk of
the force was safely withdrawn. Urquhart planned a similar maneuver.
Along the perimeter small groups of men would keep up a fusillade to
deceive the enemy while the larger body of troops slipped away.
Gradually units along the northern face of the perimeter would move
down along its sides to the river, to be evacuated. Then the last
forces, closest to the Rhine, would follow. "In effect," Urquhart said
later, "I planned the withdrawal like the collapse of a paper bag. I
wanted small parties stationed at strategic places to give the
impression we were still there, all the while pulling downward and
along each flank."

Urquhart hoped to contrive other indications of "normality"--the usual
pattern of radio transmissions would continue; Sheriff Thompson's
artillery was to fire to the last; and military police in and about the
German prisoner-of-war compound on the Hartenstein's tennis courts were
to continue their patrols. They would be among the very last to leave.
Obviously, besides a rear guard, other men would have to stay behind--
doctors, medical orderlies and serious casualties. Wounded men unable
to walk but capable of occupying defensive positions would stay and
continue firing.

To reach the river, Urquhart's men would follow one route down each
side of the perimeter. Glider pilots, acting as guides, would steer
them along the escape path, marked in some areas with white tape.
Troopers, their boots muffled by strips of cloth, were to make their
way to the water's edge. There, beachmasters would load them into a
small evacuation fleet: fourteen powered

storm boats--managed by two companies of Canadian engineers--each
capable of carrying fourteen men, and a variety of smaller craft.
Their number was indeterminate. No one, including the beachmasters,
would remember how many, but among them were several DUKW'S and a few
canvas-and-plywood assault craft remaining from previous crossings.

Urquhart was gambling that the Germans observing the boat traffic would
assume men were trying to move into the perimeter rather than out of
it. Apart from the dreadful possibility of his troops being detected
other hazardous difficulties could occur as more than two thousand men
tried to escape. If a rigid time schedule was not maintained, Urquhart
could foresee, an appalling bottleneck would develop at the narrow base
of the perimeter, now barely 650 yards wide. If they were jammed into
the embarkation area, his men might be mercilessly annihilated. After
the futile experience of the Poles and the Dorsets in trying to enter
the perimeter, Urquhart did not expect the evacuation to go
unchallenged. Although every gun that XXX Corps could bring to bear
would be in action to protect his men, Urquhart still expected the
Germans to inflict heavy casualties. Time was an enemy, for it would
take hours to complete the evacuation. There was also the problem of
keeping the plan secret. Because men might be captured and
interrogated during the day, no one, apart from senior officers and
those given specific tasks, was to be told of the evacuation until the
last minute.

After conferring with General Thomas by radio and obtaining agreement
on the major points in his withdrawal plan, Urquhart called a meeting
of the few senior officers left: Brigadier Pip Hicks; Lieutenant
Colonel Iain Murray of the Glider Pilot Regiment, now in charge of the
wounded Hackett's command; Lieutenant Colonel R. G. Loder-Symonds, the
division's artillery chief; Colonel Mackenzie, the chief of staff; and
Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Myers, the engineering officer who would be in
charge of the evacuation. Just before the conference began, Colonel
Graeme Warrack, the chief medical officer, arrived to see Urquhart and
became the first man to learn of the plan. Warrack

was "downcast and unhappy. Not because I had to stay --I had an
obligation to the wounded--but because up to this moment I had expected
the division to be relieved in a very short time."

In the Hartenstein cellar, surrounded by his officers, Urquhart broke
the news. "We're getting out tonight," he told them. Step by step he
outlined his plan. The success of the withdrawal would depend on
meticulous timing. Any concentration of troops or traffic jams could
cause disaster. Men were to be kept moving, without stopping to fight.
"While they should take evasive action if fired upon, they should only
fire back if it is a matter of life or death." As his despondent
officers prepared to leave, Urquhart cautioned them that the evacuation
must be kept secret as long as possible. Only those with a need to
know were to be told.

The news carried little surprise for Urquhart's senior officers. For
hours it had been obvious that the position was hopeless. Still, like
Warrack, they were bitter that relief had never arrived. In their
minds, too, was the fear that their men might endure an even greater
ordeal during the withdrawal than they had in the perimeter. By
accident Signalman James Cockrill, attached to division headquarters,
heard the terse message: "Operation Berlin is tonight." He puzzled
over its meaning. Withdrawal did not even occur to him. Cockrill
believed the division "would fight to the last man and the last
bullet." He thought that "Operation Berlin" might mean an all-out
attempt to break through for the Arnhem bridge "in some kind of heroic
"Charge of the Light Brigade" or something." Another man knew all too
clearly what it meant. At the headquarters of the 1/ Airlanding
Brigade, Colonel Payton-Reid of the KOSB'S, helping to arrange details
of the evacuation of the western edge of the perimeter, heard Brigadier
Pip Hicks mutter something about "another Dunkirk."

All through this day, in a frenzy of attacks, the Germans tried to
overrun positions, but still the Red Devils held. Then, men would
recall, shortly after 8 P.m. the news of the withdrawal began filtering
down. To Major George Powell of Hackett's 156th Battalion, at the top
of the perimeter, the news was "an appalling blow. I thought of all
the men who had died, and then I thought

the whole effort had been a waste." Because his men were among those
who had the farthest to come, Powell started them off in single file at
8:15 P.m.

Private Robert Downing of the 10th Parachute Battalion was told to
leave his slit trench and go to the Hartenstein Hotel. There, he was
met by a sergeant. "There's an old plastic razor over there," the
sergeant told him. "You get yourself a dry shave." Downing stared at
him. "Hurry up," the sergeant told him. "We're crossing the river and
by God we're going back looking like British soldiers."

In a cellar near his position Major Robert Cain borrowed another razor.
Someone had found water, and Cain scraped the razor over a week's
growth of beard and then dried his face carefully on the inside of his
smoke-blackened, bloodstained smock. Coming out he stood for a minute
in lashing rain looking at the church in lower Oosterbeek. There was a
gold cock on the weather vane. Cain had checked it at intervals during
the battle. For him, it was a good luck symbol. As long as the gold
cock remained, so would the division. He felt an overpowering sadness.
He wondered if the weather vane would still be there tomorrow.

Like other men, Major Thomas Toler of the Glider Pilot Regiment had
been told by Colonel Iain Murray to clean up a little. Toler couldn't
have cared less. He was so tired that just "thinking about cleaning up
was an effort." Murray handed over his own razor. "We're getting out.
We don't want the army to think we're a bunch of tramps." With a
small dab of lather that Murray had left, Toler too shaved his beard.
"It was amazing how much better I felt, mentally and physically," he
recalls. In Murray's command post was the Pegasus flag Hackett's men
had planned to fly as the Second Army arrived. Toler stared at it for
a moment. Then he carefully rolled it up and put it away.

In artillery positions where troopers now would fire at will to help
disguise the evacuation, Gunner Robert Christie listened as the troop's
signalman, Willie Speedie, called in to the battery. Speedie gave a
new station as control and then said simply, "I am closing down now.
Ou."

Sergeant Stanley Sullivan, one of the pathfinders who had led the way
nine days before, was furious when the news reached him. "I had
already figured we'd had it anyway and we might as well go down
fighting." Sullivan's outpost was in a school "where youngsters had
been trying to learn. I was afraid for all those children if we pulled
out. I had to let them know, and the Germans too, just how we felt."
On the blackboard in the room he had been defending, Sullivan printed
large block letters and underlined them several times. The message
read: "We'll Be Back!!!" * * The children would never see it. On
September 27, in a brutal reprisal against the Dutch, the Germans
ordered the entire Arnhem area evacuated. Arnhem and the surrounding
villages were to remain uninhabited until the very last days of the
war, when Canadian troops arrived on April 14, 1945.

At precisely 9 P.m., the night sky was ripped by the flash of XXX
Corps's massed guns, and fires broke out all along the edge of the
perimeter as a torrent of shells rained down on the German positions.
Forty-five minutes later, Urquhart's men started to pull out. The bad
weather that had prevented the prompt arrival of troops and supplies
during the week now worked for the Red Devils; the withdrawal began in
near-gale-like conditions which--with the din of the
bombardment--helped cover up the British escape.

In driving wind and rain the 1/ Airborne survivors, faces blackened,
equipment tied down and boots muffled against sound, climbed stiffly
out of positions and lined up for the dangerous trek down to the river.
The darkness and the weather made it impossible for men to see more
than a few feet in front of them. The troopers formed a living chain,
holding hands or clinging to the camouflage smock of the man ahead.

Sergeant William Tompson, a glider pilot, hunched his body against the
pouring rain. Charged with helping to direct troopers to the
riverbank, he was prepared for a long wet night. As he watched men
file past he was struck by the fact that "few men but us had ever known
what it was like to live in a mile-square abattoir."

To Signalman James Cockrill the meaning of "Operation

Berlin" was now only too clear. He had been detailed to stay behind
and operate his set as the troops withdrew. His instructions were "to
stay on the air and keep the set functioning to make the Germans think
everything is normal." Cockrill sat alone in darkness under the
veranda of the Hartenstein, "bashing away on the key. I could hear a
lot of movement around me, but I had no other instructions than to keep
the set on the air." Cockrill was certain that he would be a prisoner
before morning. His rifle was propped up beside him, but it was
useless. One bullet was a dummy, containing the cypher code used to
contact Second Army. It was the only one he had left.

On the Rhine's southern bank, doctors, medical orderlies and Dutch Red
Cross nursing personnel stood ready in reception areas and at the
collection point. In Driel convoys of ambulances and vehicles waited
to move Urquhart's survivors back to Nijmegen. Although preparations
for the arrival of the men were going on all about her, Cora Baltussen,
after three days and nights tending the wounded, was so exhausted she
thought the bombardment and the activities on the southern bank marked
the prelude to yet another crossing attempt. In the concentrated
shelling of Driel, Cora had been wounded by shrapnel in the head, left
shoulder and side. Although the injuries were painful, Cora considered
them superficial. She was more concerned about her bloody dress. She
cycled home to change before returning to help tend the fresh flow of
casualties she was certain would shortly arrive. On the way Cora rode
into enemy shellfire. Thrown from her bicycle, she lay unhurt for some
time in a muddy ditch, then she set off again. At home exhaustion
overcame her. In the cellar she lay down for a short nap. She slept
all through the night, unaware that "Operation Berlin" was taking
place.

Along the river at the base of the perimeter the evacuation fleet,
manned by Canadian and British engineers, lay waiting. So far the
enemy's suspicions had not been aroused. In fact, it was clear that
the Germans did not know what was happening. Their guns were firing at
the remaining Dorsets, who had begun a

diversionary attack west of the perimeter. Still farther west, Germans
were firing as British artillery laid down a barrage to give the
appearance of a river assault in that area. Urquhart's deception plan
appeared to be working.

In the drenching rain, lines of men snaked slowly down both sides of
the perimeter to the river. Some men were so exhausted that they lost
their way and fell into enemy hands; others, unable to go on by
themselves, had to be helped. In the inky darkness nobody stopped. To
halt invited noise, confusion--and death.

In the ruddy glow of fires and burning buildings, Sergeant Ron Kent, of
Major Boy Wilson's pathfinder group, led his platoon to a cabbage patch
designated as the company rendezvous point. There they waited until
the remainder of the company assembled before moving toward the river.
"Although we knew the Rhine lay due south," Kent says, "we didn't know
what point they were evacuating us from." Suddenly the men spotted
lines of red tracers coming from the south and taking these as a guide,
they moved on. Soon they came to white tape and the shadowy figures of
glider pilots who directed them along. Kent's group heard machine-gun
fire and grenade explosions off to their left. Major Wilson and
another group of men had run into Germans. In the fierce skirmish that
followed, with safety only a mile away, two soldiers were killed.

Men were to remember the evacuation by small details--poignant,
frightening and sometimes humorous. As Private Henry Blyton of the 1/
Battalion moved down to the river, he heard someone crying. Ahead, the
line stopped. Troopers made for the side of the path. There, lying on
the sodden ground, was a wounded soldier crying for his mother. The
men were ordered to keep on moving. No one was to stop for the
wounded. Yet many did. Before troopers in Major Dickie Lonsdale's
force left their positions, they went to the Ter Horst house and took
as many of the walking wounded as they could.

Lance Corporal Sydney Nunn, who with a glider pilot had knocked out a
Tiger tank earlier in the week, thought he would

never make it to the river. By the church where artillery positions
had been overrun during the day, Nunn and a group of KOSB'S had a
sharp, brief skirmish with the Germans. In the rain and darkness most
of the men got away. Lying on the ground Nunn received the first
injury he had had in nine days of fighting. Shrapnel hit some stones
and one of Nunn's front teeth was chipped by a pebble.

Sergeant Thomas Bentley of the 10th Battalion was following the Phantom
operator, Lieutenant Neville Hay. "We were sniped at continually," he
remembers. "I saw two glider pilots walk out from the shadows and
deliberately draw the German fire, apparently so we could see where it
was coming from." Both guides were killed.

In the Hartenstein, General Urquhart and his staff prepared to leave.
The war diary was closed; papers were burned and then Hancock, the
General's batman, wrapped Urquhart's boots with strips of curtain.
Everybody knelt as a chaplain said the Lord's Prayer. Urquhart
remembered the bottle of whiskey his batman had put in his pack on D
Day. "I handed it around," Urquhart says, "and everyone had a nip."
Finally Urquhart went down to the cellars to see the wounded "in their
bloody bandages and crude splints" and said goodbye to those aware of
what was happening. Others, drowsy with morphia, were mercifully
unaware of the withdrawal. One haggard soldier, propping himself up
against the cellar wall, told Urquhart, "I hope you make it, sir."

Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters, the Dutch liaison officer at
Division headquarters, moving behind the General's group, observed
absolute silence. "With my accent had I opened my mouth I might have
been taken for a German," he says. At some point Wolters lost his grip
on the man in front of him. "I didn't know what to do. I simply kept
going, praying that I was heading in the right direction." Wolters
felt particularly depressed. He kept thinking of his wife and the
daughter he had never seen. He had not been able to phone them even
though his

family lived only a few miles from the Hartenstein. The watch he had
bought for his wife in England was still in his pocket; the Teddy bear
he had planned to give his daughter was somewhere in a wrecked glider.
If he was lucky enough to make it back to the river, Wolters would be
leaving, probably for England, once more.

At the river the crossings had begun. Lieutenant Colonel Myers and his
beachmasters packed men into the boats as fast as they arrived. But
now the Germans, though still not aware that a withdrawal was taking
place, could see the ferrying operations by the light of flares.
Mortars and artillery began ranging in. Boats were holed and capsized.
Men struggling in the water screamed for help. Others, already dead,
were swept away. Wounded men clung to wreckage and tried to swim to
the southern bank. Within one hour half the evacuation fleet was
destroyed, but still the ferrying went on.

By the time Major George Powell's men reached the river from their long
trek down the eastern side of the perimeter, Powell believed that the
evacuation was over. A boat was bobbing up and down in the water,
sinking lower as waves hit against it. Powell waded out. The boat was
full of holes and the sappers in it were all dead. As some of his men
struck out swimming, a boat suddenly appeared out of the dark. Powell
hastily organized his men and got some of them aboard. He and the
remaining troopers waited until the craft returned. On the high
embankment south of the Rhine, Powell stood for a moment looking back
north. "All at once I realized I was across. I simply could not
believe I had gotten out alive." Turning to his fifteen bedraggled
men, Powell said, "Form up in threes." He marched them to the
reception center. Outside the building, Powell shouted, "156th
Battalion, halt! Right turn! Fall out!" Standing in the rain he
watched them head for shelter. "It was all over, but by God we had
come out as we had gone in. Proud."

As General Urquhart's crowded boat prepared to leave, it got caught in
the mud. Hancock, his batman, jumped out and pushed them off. "He got
us clear," Urquhart says, "but as he struggled to

get back aboard someone shouted, "Let go! It's overcrowded already!""
Irked by this ingratitude "Hancock ignored the remark and, with his
last reserves, pulled himself into the boat."

Under machine-gun fire Urquhart's boat was halfway across when the
engine suddenly stuttered and stopped. The boat began to drift with
the current; to Urquhart "it seemed an absolute age before the engine
came to life again." Minutes later they reached the southern bank.
Looking back Urquhart saw flashes of fire as the Germans raked the
river. "I don't think," he says, "they knew what they were firing
at."

All along the bank of the Rhine and in the meadows and woods behind,
hundreds of men waited. But now with only half the fleet still
operable and under heavy machine-gun fire, the bottleneck that Urquhart
had feared occurred. Confusion developed in the crowded lines, and
although there was no panic, many men tried to push forward, and their
officers and sergeants tried to hold them in check. Lance Corporal
Thomas Harris of the 1/ Battalion remembers "hundreds and hundreds
waiting to get across. Boats were being swamped by the weight of the
numbers of men trying to board." And mortars were now falling in the
embarkation area as the Germans got the range. Harris, like many other
men, decided to swim. Taking off his battle dress and boots, he dived
in and, to his surprise, made it over.

Others were not so lucky. By the time Gunner Charles Pavey got down to
the river, the embarkation area was also under machine-gun fire. As
the men huddled on the bank a man came swimming toward the place where
Pavey lay. Ignoring the bullets peppering the shore he hauled himself
out of the water and, gasping for breath, said, "Thank God, I'm over."
Pavey heard someone say, "Bloody fool. You're still on the same
side."

Sergeant Alf Roullier, who had managed to cook and serve a stew on
Sunday, now attempted to swim the river. As he floundered in the water
a boat drew alongside and someone grabbed his collar. He heard a man
shout, "It's O.k., mate. Keep going. Keep going." Roullier was
totally disoriented. He believed he was drowning. Then he heard the
same voice say, "Bloody good, old boy," and a Canadian engineer lifted
him into the boat. "Where the hell am I?" the dazed Roullier mumbled.
The Canadian grinned. "You're almost home," he said.

It was nearing daybreak when Signalman James Cockrill, still at his set
under the veranda of the Hartenstein, heard a fierce whisper. "Come
on, Chick," a voice said, "let's go." As the men headed for the river,
there was a sudden sharp burst of noise. Cockrill felt a tug on his
neck and shoulders. His Sten gun, slung over his back, had been split
wide open by shrapnel. Nearing the bank, Cockrill's group came across
a few glider pilots standing in the bushes. "Don't go until we tell
you," one of the pilots said. "The Germans have got a gun fixed on
this area, a Spandau firing about waist high." Coached by the pilots,
the men sprinted forward one at a time. When Cockrill's turn came he
crouched down and began to run. Seconds later he fell over a pile of
bodies. "There must have been twenty or thirty," he remembers. "I
heard men shouting for their mothers and others begging us not to leave
them there. We couldn't stop." At the river's edge a flare exploded
and machine guns began to chatter. Cockrill heard someone shout for
those who could to swim. He went into the chilly water, striking out
past panic-stricken men who appeared to be floundering all about him.

Suddenly Cockrill heard a voice say, "All right, buddy, don't worry.
I've got you." A Canadian hauled him into a boat and seconds later
Cockrill heard the boat ground on shore. "I nearly cried when I found
I was back where I started," he says. The boat had gone on in to pick
up wounded. As men all around helped with the loading, the craft
started off again and Cockrill remembers a rush as men climbed in from
all sides. Although their boat was weighted down and under fire, the
Canadians made it to the far shore. After hours under the veranda and
his nightmarish trip across the water, Cockrill was dazed. "The next
thing I knew I was in a barn and someone gave me a cigarette." Then
Cockrill remembered one thing. Frantically he searched his pockets
and

brought out his single piece of ammunition: the .303 dummy bullet with
his cypher code inside.

Shortly before 2 A.m. what remained of the 1/ Airborne's ammunition was
blown up. Sheriff Thompson's gunners fired the last remaining shells
and artillerymen removed the breech blocks. Lance Bombardier Percy
Parkes and the remainder of his crew were told to pull back. Parkes
was surprised. He had not thought about the withdrawal. He had
expected to stay until his post was overrun by the Germans. He was
even more amazed when he reached the river. The area was jammed with
hundreds of men and someone said that all the boats had been sunk. A
man near Parkes took a deep breath. "It looks like we swim," he said.
Parkes stared at the river. "It was very wide. In full flood the
current looked to be about nine knots. I didn't think I could make it.
I saw men jumping in fully dressed and being swept downstream. Others
made it across only to be shot scrambling out of the water. I saw one
chap paddle across on a plank, still carrying his pack. If he could do
it, I could."

Parkes stripped to his shorts, throwing away everything including his
gold pocket watch. In the swift current his shorts slipped down and
Parkes kicked them off. He made it over and, hiding by bushes and in
ditches, eventually reached a small deserted farm cottage. Parkes went
in to find some clothing. Emerging a few minutes later, he encountered
a private from the Dorsets, who directed him to a collection point,
where he was given a mug of hot tea and some cigarettes. It took the
exhausted Parkes some time to understand why everyone was staring at
him. He was dressed in a man's colored sports shirt and wore a pair of
ladies' linen bloomers tied at the knee.

Private Alfred Dullforce of the 10th Battalion swam to the south bank
nude but still carrying a .38. To his embarrassment two women were
standing with the soldiers on the bank. Dullforce "felt like diving
straight back into the water." One of the women called to him and held
out a skirt. "She didn't bat an eyelash at my nakedness," he
remembers. "She told me not to

worry, because they were there to help the men coming across." In a
multicolored skirt that reached to his knees and wearing a pair of
clogs, Dullforce was taken to a British truck driving the survivors
back to Nijmegen.

By now the Germans were flaying the embarkation area and mortar shells
were screaming in. As Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters ran behind
a line of men for a boat, there was an explosion among the group. "I
was absolutely unharmed," Wolters recalls. "But around me lay eight
dead men and one severely wounded." He gave the man a shot of morphia
and carried him to the boat. In the already overloaded craft there was
no place for Wolters. He waded into the water and, hanging onto the
side of the boat, was pulled across the river. He staggered onto the
southern bank and collapsed.

As dawn came, the evacuation fleet had been almost destroyed, yet the
Canadian and British engineers, braving mortar, artillery and heavy
machine-gun fire, continued to ferry the men across in the boats that
remained. Private Arthur Shearwood of the 11th Battalion found
Canadian engineers loading some wounded into a small boat. One of the
Canadians motioned for Shearwood to get aboard. The outboard motor
could not be restarted, and the Canadians asked all soldiers still
carrying rifles to start paddling. Shearwood tapped the man in front
of him. "Let's go," he said. "Start paddling." The man looked at
Shearwood without expression. "I can't," he said, pointing to his
bandaged shoulder. "I've lost an arm."

Major Robert Cain had put all his men across by dawn. With Sergeant
Major "Robbo" Robinson, he waited on the bank so he could follow, but
no more boats appeared to be heading in. In a group of other men
someone pointed to a slightly holed assault craft bobbing on the water
and a trooper swam out to bring it back. Using rifle butts, Cain and
Robinson began rowing, while troopers who still had helmets bailed. On
the south bank a military policeman directed them to a barn. Inside,
one of the first men Cain recognized was Brigadier Hicks. The
brigadier came

over quickly. "Well," he said, "here's one officer, at least, who's
shaved." Cain grinned tiredly. "I was well brought up, sir," he
said.

On the perimeter's edge scores of men still huddled in the rain under
German fire. Although one or two boats attempted to cross under cover
of a smoke screen, it was now, in daylight, impossible for the
evacuation to continue. Some men who tried to swim for it were caught
by the swift current or by machine-gun fire. Others made it. Still
others, so badly wounded they could do nothing, sat helplessly in the
pounding rain or set out north-- back to the hospitals in the
perimeter. Many decided to hide out and wait until darkness again
before trying to reach the opposite shore. Eventually scores succeeded
in making their escape this way.

On the southern bank and in Driel, exhausted, grimy men searched for
their units--or what remained of them. Sergeant Stanley Sullivan of
the pathfinders, who had printed his defiant message on the school
blackboard, remembers someone asking, "Where's the 1/ Battalion?" A
corporal immediately stood up. "This is it, sir," he said. Beside him
a handful of bedraggled men pulled themselves painfully erect. Gunner
Robert Christie roamed through crowds of men searching for troopers of
his battery. No one looked familiar. Christie suddenly felt tears
sting his eyes. He had no idea whether anyone but him was left from
Number 2 Battery.

On the road to Driel, General Urquhart came to General Thomas'
headquarters. Refusing to go in, he waited outside in the rain as his
aide arranged for transportation. It was not necessary. As Urquhart
stood outside, a jeep arrived from General Browning's headquarters and
an officer escorted Urquhart back to Corps. He and his group were
taken to a house on the southern outskirts of Nijmegen. "Browning's
aide, Major Harry Cator, showed us into a room and suggested we take
off our wet clothes," Urquhart says. The proud Scot refused.
"Perversely, I wanted Browning to see us as we were--as we had been."
After a long wait Browning appeared, "as immaculate as ever." He

looked, Urquhart thought, as if "he had just come off parade, rather
than from his bed in the middle of a battle." To the Corps commander
Urquhart said simply, "I'm sorry things did not turn out as well as I
had hoped." Browning, offering Urquhart a drink, replied, "You did all
you could." Later, in the bedroom that he had been given, Urquhart
found that the sleep he had yearned for so long was impossible. "There
were too many things," he said, "on my mind and my conscience."

There was indeed much to think about. The 1/ Airborne Division had
been sacrificed and slaughtered. Of Urquhart's original 10,005-man
force only 2,163 troopers, along with 160 Poles and 75 Dorsets, came
back across the Rhine. After nine days, the division had approximately
1,200 dead and 6,642 missing, wounded or captured. The Germans, it
later turned out, had suffered brutally, too: 3,300 casualties,
including 1,100 dead.

The Arnhem adventure was over and with it Market-Garden. There was
little left to do now but pull back and consolidate. The war would go
on until May, 1945. "Thus ended in failure the greatest airborne
operation of the war," one American historian later wrote. "Although
Montgomery asserted that it had been 90 percent successful, his
statement was merely a consoling figure of speech. All objectives save
Arnhem had been won, but without Arnhem the rest were as nothing. In
return for so much courage and sacrifice, the Allies had won a 50-mile
salient--leading nowhere." * * Dr. John C. warren, Airborne
Operations in World War II, European Theater, p. 146.

Perhaps because so few were expected to escape, there was not enough
transport for the exhausted survivors. Many men, having endured so
much else, now had to march back to Nijmegen. On the road Captain
Roland Langton of the Irish Guards stood in the cold rain watching the
1/ Airborne come back. As tired, filthy men stumbled along, Langton
stepped back. He knew his squadron had done its best to drive up the
elevated highway from

Nijmegen to Arnhem, yet he felt uneasy, "almost embarrassed to speak to
them." As one of the men drew abreast of another Guardsman standing
silently beside the road, the trooper shouted, "Where the hell have you
been, mate?" The Guardsman answered quietly, "We've been fighting for
five months." Corporal William Chennell of the Guards heard one of the
airborne men say, "Oh? Did you have a nice drive up?"

As the men streamed back one officer, who had stood in the rain for
hours, searched every face. Captain Eric Mackay, whose little band of
stragglers had held out so gallantly in the schoolhouse near the Arnhem
bridge, had escaped and reached Nijmegen. Now he looked for members of
his squadron. Most of them had not made it to the Arnhem bridge; but
Mackay, with stubborn hope, looked for them in the airborne lines
coming out of Oosterbeek. "The worst thing of all was their faces," he
says of the troopers. "They all looked unbelievably drawn and tired.
Here and there you could pick out a veteran--a face with an
unmistakable I-don't-give-a-damn look, as if he could never be beaten."
All that night and into the dawn Mackay stayed by the road. "I didn't
see one face I knew. As I continued to watch I hated everyone. I
hated whoever was responsible for this and I hated the army for its
indecision and I thought of the waste of life and of a fine division
dumped down the drain. And for what?" It was full light when Mackay
went back to Nijmegen. There he began to check collecting points and
billets, determined to find his men. Of the 200 engineers in his
squadron, five, including Mackay, had come back.

On the other side of the river remained the soldiers and civilians
whose jobs and injuries demanded that they be left behind. Small bands
of men too late to make the trip stayed too, crouched down in the
now-unmanned trenches and gun pits. For these survivors there was no
longer any hope. In the blackened perimeter they awaited their fate.

Medic Taffy Brace had brought the last of his walking wounded down to
the river, only to find the banks now empty.

Huddling with them, Brace saw a captain coming forward. "What are we
going to do?" the officer asked Brace. "There won't be any more
boats." Brace looked at the injured men. "I guess we'll have to stay
then," he said. "I can't leave them." The captain shook hands. "Good
luck," he told them all. "I'm going to try to swim across." Brace
last saw the officer wading out into the water. "Good luck yourself,"
Brace called. "Goodbye."

For Major Guy Rigby-Jones, a physician at the Tafelberg, "the
division's leaving was a bitter pill to swallow," but he carried on his
work. With teams of medics Rigby-Jones scoured the houses in the area
of the hotel, bringing in wounded men. Often hand-carrying the
casualties to collection points, the medics loaded them into German
trucks, ambulances and jeeps and then climbed on themselves, heading
into captivity.

Padre Pare had slept the whole night through at the Schoonoord. He
awoke with a start, sure that something was terribly wrong. Then he
realized that it was unnaturally quiet. Hurrying out into a room, he
saw a medic standing at a window, in full view of anyone outside. As
Pare came up the medic turned around. "The division's gone," he said.
Pare, who had not been told about the evacuation, stared at him.
"You're mad, man." The medic shook his head. "Look for yourself, sir.
We really are prisoners now. Our chaps have had to retreat." Pare
couldn't believe it. "Sir," the medic said, "you'll have to break the
news to the patients. I haven't got the nerve to tell them." Pare
made the rounds of the hotel. "Everyone tried to take it in good
heart," he recalls, "but we were all in a fit of deep depression."
Then in the large room where most of the wounded still sheltered a
soldier sat down at a piano and began to play a medley of popular
songs. Men started to sing and Pare found himself joining in.

"It was queer after the hell of the last few days," Pare says. "The
Germans could not understand it, but it was easy enough to explain.
The suspense, the sense of being left behind produced a tremendous
reaction. There was nothing left to do but sing." Later as Hendrika
van der Vlist and other Dutch civilians pre-

pared to leave to help the wounded in German hospitals, Pare waved
goodbye regretfully. "They had suffered with us, gone hungry and
thirsty, and yet they had no thought for themselves." As the last
ambulances disappeared, Pare and the medical staff loaded their meager
belongings onto a German truck. "The Germans helped us," he recalls.
"There was a curious lack of animosity. None of us had anything to
say." As the truck drove off, Pare stared moodily at the blackened
wreckage of the Schoonoord, "where absolute miracles had been worked."
He was "firmly convinced that it was only a matter of a day or two,
possibly this coming night, before the Second Army crossed the Rhine
and took the area back again."

Across the street from the church, Kate ter Horst had said goodbye to
the wounded, all now prisoners. Pulling a hand cart and accompanied by
her five children, she set out to walk to Apeldoorn. A short distance
away she stopped and looked back at the ancient vicarage that had been
her home. "A ray of sunshine strikes a bright yellow parachute hanging
from the roof," she wrote. "Bright yellow ... A greeting from the
Airborne ... Farewell, friends ... God bless you."

Young Anje van Maanen, also on the road to Apeldoorn, kept looking for
her father as the Red Cross cars and ambulances passed, bringing the
wounded from the Tafelberg. With her aunt and her brother, Anje stared
at the familiar faces she had come to know throughout the week. Then,
as a truck passed by, Anje saw her father, riding in it. She screamed
to him and began to run. The truck stopped and Dr. van Maanen climbed
down to greet his family. Hugging them all, he said, "We have never
been so poor and never so rich. We have lost our village, our home and
our possessions. But we have each other and we are alive." As Dr.
van Maanen got back on the truck to care for the wounded, he arranged
for the family to meet in Apeldoorn. As they walked among hundreds of
other refugees, Anje turned to look back. "The sky was colored
scarlet," she wrote, "like the blood of the airborne who gave their
lives for us. We four all are alive, but at the end of this hopeless
war week the battle has made an impres-

not on my soul. Glory to all our dear, brave Tommies and to all the
people who gave their lives to help and save others."

In Driel, Cora Baltussen awoke to a strange silence. It was midmorning
Tuesday, September 26. Painfully stiff from her wounds and puzzled by
the silence, Cora limped outside. Smoke billowed up from the center of
the town and from Oosterbeek across the river. But the sounds of
battle were gone. Getting her bicycle, Cora pedaled slowly toward
town. The streets were deserted; the troops had gone. In the distance
she saw the last vehicles in a convoy heading south for Nijmegen. Near
one of Driel's ruined churches only a few soldiers lingered by some
jeeps. Suddenly Cora realized that the British and Poles were
withdrawing. The fight was over; the Germans would soon return. As
she walked over to the small group of soldiers, the bell in the damaged
church steeple began to toll. Cora looked up. Sitting in the belfry
was an airborne trooper, a bandage around his head. "What happened?"
Cora called out. "It's all over," the trooper shouted. "All over. We
pulled out. We're the last lot." Cora stared up at him. "Why are you
ringing the bell?" The trooper kicked at it once more. The sound
echoed over the thousand-year-old Dutch village of Driel and died away.
The trooper looked down at Cora. "It seemed like the right thing to
do," he said.

"In my--prejudiced-- 596-597 view, if the operation had been properly
backed from its inception, and given the aircraft, ground forces, and
administrative resources necessary for the job--it would have succeeded
in spite of my mistakes, or the adverse weather, or the presence of the
2nd SS Panzer Corps in the Arnhem area. I remain MARKET-GARDEN'S
unrepentant advocate." --Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery,
Memoirs: Montgomery of Alamein, p. 267

"My country can never again afford the luxury of another Montgomery
success." --Bernhard, The Prince of the Netherlands, to the author.

A NOTE ON 598-599 CASUALTIES

Allied forces suffered more casualties in Market-Garden than in the
mammoth invasion of Normandy. Most historians agree that in the
twenty-four-hour period of D Day, June 6, 1944, total Allied losses
reached an estimated 10,000-12,000. In the nine days of Market-Garden
combined losses--airborne and ground forces--in killed, wounded and
missing amounted to more than 17,000.

British casualties were the highest: 13,226. Urquhart's division was
almost completely destroyed. In the 10,005 Arnhem force, which
includes the Poles and glider pilots, casualties totaled 7,578. In
addition to this figure RAF pilot and crew losses came to another 294,
making a total in wounded, dead and missing of 7,872. Horrocks' XXX
Corps lost 1,480 and the British 8th and 12th Corps another 3,874.

American losses, including glider pilots and IX Troop Carrier Command,
are put at 3,974. General Gavin's 82nd Airborne Division had 1,432;
General Taylor's 101/, 2,118; and air crew losses 424.

Complete German figures remain unknown but in Arnhem and Oosterbeek
admitted casualties came to 3,300 including 1,300 dead. However, in
the entire Market-Garden battle area, Model's losses were much higher.
While no figure breakdown is available for the number of enemy killed,
wounded and missing, from the breakout at Neerpelt, then along the
corridor in battles at Nijmegen, Grave, Veghel, Best and Eindhoven,
after interviewing German commanders I would conservatively estimate
that Army Group B lost at least another 7,500-10,000 men, of which
perhaps a quarter were killed.

What were Dutch civilian casualties? No one can say. Deaths in Arnhem
and Oosterbeek are said to have been low, less than 500, but no one
knows with any certainty. I have heard casualty figures--that is,
dead, wounded or missing--given as high as 10,000 in the entire
Operation Market-Garden campaign and as a result of the forcible
evacuation of the Arnhem sector together with deprivation and
starvation in the terrible winter that followed the attack.

THE SOLDIERS AND 600-601 CIVILIANS OF "A BRIDGE TOO FAR" What They Do
Today

Following is a list of all those who out of their firsthand
recollections contributed information to "A Bridge Too Far." First,
the men of the Allied armies; then the Dutch who lived in the area
during the battle; and finally the German military who fought there.
Occupations may have changed since this book went to press, and where
an asterisk follows a name it indicates that the contributor has died
since these lists were compiled. All ranks given are as of September,
1944.

AMERICAN Eisenhower, Dwight David, * Gen.,

Supreme Comdr. [SHAEF]. Gen. of the

Army, Comdr. in Chief, President of the

United States. Bradley, Omar Nelson, Gen. [12th

Army Group]. Gen. of the Army; Company

director, Beverly Hills, Calif. Abel, Leonard Edw., 2nd Lt

[82nd Airborne]. Attorney,

Bay Harbor Islands, Fla. Addison, William A. B., Major

[82nd Airborne]. V.-P. and

trust officer, South Carolina National

Bank, Columbia, S.c. Albritton, Earl M., Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Rural mail carrier,

Winnsboro, La. Alexander, Mark J., Lt. Col. [82nd

Airborne]. Real-estate broker,

Campbell, Calif. Alhart, John Lamar, Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Dentist, Rochester,

N.y. Allardyce, James R., P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. Engineer,

Frankenmuth, Mich. Allen, James Mann, Lt. [101/

Airborne]. President, Allen

Paint Supply Co., Denver, Colo. Allen, John Henry, P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Upholsterer, Levittown,

N.y. Allen, Ray Carroll, Lt.

Col. [101/ Airborne] Black

Angus cattle rancher, Marshall, Tex. Altomare, John G., Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. X-ray worker for

Westinghouse, Baltimore, Md. Anderson, Fred, Jr., Capt. [101/

Airborne]. V.-P. (sales),

International Corporation, Charlotte,

N.c. Ankenbrandt, Louis E., P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. Ammunition

plant mechanic, Baraboo, Wis.

Antonion, Anthony J., P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. Shoe

corrections, Long Island City, N.y. Appleby, Sam, S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Attorney, Ozark,

Mo. Arnold, George Wm., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. District manager,

Detroit News, Birmingham, Mich. Asay, Charles Verne, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Linotype operator,

Sacramento, Calif. Atkins, Lynn Cecil, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Asst. principal,

Roosevelt Elementary School, El

Paso, Tex. Badeaux, Nelson John, Tst5 [82nd

Airborne]. Pipeline maintenance man,

Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co., New

Iberia, La. Bailey, Edward N., Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Claims counselor,

veterans service, College Park, Ga. Bailey, Sam H., Jr., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Executive,

Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance

Co., Miami, Fla. Baldinger, Irving M., Tst5 [101/

Airborne]. President,

Legion-Olmer Bakery Co., New

Haven, Conn. Baldino, Fred James, Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Postman, Burbank,

Calif. Ballard, Robert Aye, Lt. Col.

[101/ Airborne].

Grove owner and operator and

Postmaster, Goulds, Fla. Barickman, John Hamilton, Sec.

Sgt. [101/ Airborne].

Steelworker, Streator, Ill. Baugh, James Emory, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Medical doctor,

Milledgeville, Ga. Baxley, George C., Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Special

representative, Southwestern Bell

Telephone Co., Hewitt, Tex. Beach, Maurice M., Col. [9th Troop

Carrier Command]. Brig. Gen.

(retired), U.s. Air Force; consulting

engineer, Garden Grove, Calif. Beaudin, Briand N., Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Pediatrician, West

Warwick, R.i. Beaver, Neal will., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Factory manager,

Ottawa Rubber Company of Bradner, O.,

Wayne, O. Bedell, Edwin Allen, Major [82nd

Airborne]. Col. (retired),

U.s. Army; superintendent,

Scientists' Cliffs Service Co.,

Inc., Port Republic, Md. Bennett, William A., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Printer, Columbia,

Pa. Bernardoni, August, P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Golf professional,

Deerfield, Ill. Best, William Grew, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Pathologist, Glen

Mills, Pa. Besterbreurtje, Arie D., Capt.

[82nd Airborne]. Clergyman,

Charlottesville, Va. Biekes, Tillman Edward, Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Packinghouse worker,

Indianapolis, Ind. Bills, Lloyd Elvin, P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. Maintenance man,

Capital City Telephone Company,

Holts Summit, Mo. Birtwistle, Owen G., Col. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Col.

(retired), U.s. Air Force;

Commandant, Extension Course

Institute, Air University, Gunter

A.f.b., Ala. Blackmon, Sumpter, Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Principal, Rigdon

Road School, Columbus, Ga. Blanchard, Ernest Riley, P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. Machinist,

Bristol, Conn. Blank, William Leonard, S/sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Management

analyst, Veterans Administration

Hospital, Richmond, Va. Blatt, A. Ebner, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Physician,

Indianapolis, Ind. Blau, Vincent Francis, Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Electric-meter

mechanic, Northern States Power Co.,

Minneapolis, Minn. Blue, James R., Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Retired, Dunn,

N.c. Boling, Earl W., Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Security policeman,

Security Dept., Veterans

Administration Hospital, Akron, O. Bommer, Jack Louis, Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Salesman, Columbus

Sign Co., Columbus, O.

Borrelli, Anthony N., 2nd Lt.

[101/ Airborne]. Customer

service man, Peoples Natural Gas

Co., Glassport, Pa. Bowman, Bernard George, P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. Coal miner,

Van, W. Va. Boyce, Robert Ignatius, Pvt.

[101/ Airborne]. Postal clerk,

Springfield, Mass. Brakken, Joyce Pershing, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Carpenter, Minneapolis,

Minn. Brandt, John Rudolph, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Warehouse foreman,

Colma, Calif. Brennan, George F., 2nd Lt. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Director of

Civilian Personnel, U.s.

Dept. of Defense, Alexandria,

Va. Brierre, Eugene Donnaud, Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Attorney, New

Orleans, La. Brilla, Michael A., Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Parts manager, Grabski

Ford, Inc., Garfield Hts., O. Brockley, Harold Raymond, Cpl.

[82nd Airborne]. Postal clerk,

Connersville, Ind. Brown, Earl J., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. High-school principal,

Wilburton, Okla. Brownlee, Richard Harold, 2nd Lt.

[82nd Airborne]. Druggist,

Yuma, Colo. Brunson, Ernest Merkle, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Screen-room-department

operator, Union Camp Paper Corp.,

Savannah, Ga. Bryant, Nelson, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Outdoors writer, New

York Times, Martha's Vineyard,

Mass. Buck, Rex Douglas, Cpl.

[82nd Airborne]. Sales and

service man, Jamestown Container Corp.,

Jamestown, N.y. Buffone, Harry Joseph, Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Carpenter,

Jacksonville, Fla. Burns, Robert G., Lt. [101/

Airborne]. College football

coach, University of S. Dakota, Sioux

Falls, S.d. Burriss, Thomas Moffatt, Capt.

[82nd Airborne]. General

contractor, Columbia, S.c. Busson, Ralph Joseph, S/sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Farmer,

Doylestown, O. Cadden, James Joseph, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Detective

Lieutenant, Homicide, Baltimore

City Police Dept., Cockeysville,

Md. Campana, Victor Woodrow, Capt.

[82nd Airborne]. Schoolteacher,

Lexington, Mass. Campbell, Richard Angel, Lt.

[101/ Airborne]. Real-estate

broker, Palo Alto, Calif. Cannon, Harold Felton, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Schoolteacher, Lakeside

Junior High School, Anderson, S.c. Cannon, Howard W., Lt. Col. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. U.s.

Senator from Nevada, Washington, D.c. Carmichael, Virgil F., Lt.
[82nd

Airborne]. Circuit Judge,

Cleveland, Tenn. Carp, Samuel M., Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Salesman, Rockford

Standard Furniture Co., Rockford,

Ill. Carpenter, Frank J., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Pharmaceutical

representative, Upland, Calif. Carpenter, Lowell Keith, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Sales manager, Bend,

Ore. Carroll, Jack Paul, 2nd Lt.

[82nd Airborne]. Appraiser,

Riverside County Assessors Office,

Riverside, Calif. Carter, Winston Owen, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Farmer, Helena, Ark. Cartwright, Marvin D., Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Rural mail carrier,

Elk Mound, Wis. Cartwright, Robert Stanley, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Maintenance Dept.,

Detroit Metropolitan Airport,

Detroit, Mich. Castiglione, Frank B., P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Hobbyshop owner,

Orange, Conn. Cavanagh, Eugene, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Brakeman, Penn

Central R.r., Croton-on-Hudson,

N.y. Chappell, Julian M., Col. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Retired,

Americus, Ga. Chase, Charles Henry, Lt. Col.

[101/ Airborne]. Maj. Gen.,

U.s. Army, Chief of Staff,

Heidelberg, Germany.

Cholmondeley, Jack A., *

M/sgt. [82nd Airborne].

Secretary, Kenwood Savings and Loan

Assn., Cincinnati, O. Cipolla, John J., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Finishing superintendent,

Sargent and Greenleaf Inc. Rochester,

N.y. Clark, Harold L., Brig. Gen. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Brig. Gen.

(retired), U.s. Air Force; company

director, Daedalian Foundation, San

Antonio, Tex. Clarke, Richard Robert, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Deputy Information

Officer, Office of the Information Officer,

Hq., U.s. Air Force Southern Command,

Curundu Heights, C.z. Clemons, George W., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. School principal,

Fresno, Calif. Cockrell, James Knox, Capt.

[82nd Airborne]. Research

engineer, Falls Church, Va. Colombi, Gerald, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Real-estate

broker and developer, Belmont, Calif. Connelly, John J., Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Construction electrician,

East Islip, N.y. Connelly, John W., Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. County extension agent,

Richmond, Ind. Cook, Edgar L., 2nd Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Copy editor,

Northfield, Conn. Cook, Julian A., Maj. [82nd

Airborne]. Col., U.s. Army,

Columbia, S.c. Copas, Marshall, T/sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Sgt. Major, U.s.

Army, A.p.o., San Francisco,

Calif. Corcoran, James S., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Sales representative

and group consultant, Hospital Service

Corp., Chicago, Ill. Cox, X. B., Jr., Lt. Col.

[101/ Airborne]. Rancher, San

Angelo, Tex. Coyle, James J., Lt.

[82nd Airborne]. Accountant,

American Tobacco Co., Hicksville,

N.y. Crabtree, Bernard Gilbert, Tst5

[82nd Airborne]. Teacher,

Kissimmee, Fla. Craig, William H., Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Sales representative,

Sentry Insurance, Pasadena, Tex. Cready, Raymond D., P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Masonry

contractor, North Miami, Fla. Cronkite, Walter, News

Correspondent. CBS commentator, New

York, N.y. Damianov, George John, T/sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Plasterer, King

of Prussia, Pa. Dahlin, John F., Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Aircraft engineer,

North Hollywood, Calif. Davidson, Lawrence H., P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Owner,

Davidson Meat Market, Franklin,

Ky. Davis, Andrew James, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Heavy equipment

operator, Sun Valley, Calif. Davis, Robert, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Assistant sales

manager, West port, Conn. Dawson, Buck, 2nd Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. International Swimming

Hall of Fame, Ft. Lauderdale,

Fla. De Paul, Leo J., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Salesman, Cleveland,

O. Defer, Raymond Pierre, Tst5 [101/

Airborne]. Owner, home appliance

sales and service store, Warrenville,

Ill. Demetras, A. D., Wire Chief

[82nd Airborne]. Attorney at

law, Reno, Nev. De Vasto, Francis Alphonse,

P.f.c. [101/ Airborne].

Contracts Administration, U.s.

Government, Burlington, Mass. Dickson, Robert S., III,

Lt. [101/ Airborne]. Col.,

U.s. Army, Defense Attach`e,

Teheran, Iran. Dietrich, Frank Leslie, T/sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Lt. Col.,

U.s. Army, Silver Springs, Md. Dispenza, Peter, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Police officer,

N.y.C.p.d., Woodside, N.y. Dix, Shirley H., Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Dentist, Miami,

Fla.

Dobberstein, Hugo Paul, P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Laboratory

technician, Kimberly-Clark Corp.,

Appleton, Wis. Dodd, Edgar Frank, Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Minister, Crockett,

Tex. Dohun, Charles J., S/sgt [101/

Airborne]. Manager of resort

motel, Topsail Beach, N.c. Donalson, John M., Col. [9th

Troop Carrier Command].

President, Tennessee Forging Steel

Corp., Rockwood, Tenn. Donnewirth, George Adam, Tst5

[101/ Airborne]. Carpenter,

Clyde, O. Doxzen, George D., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Installation supervisor,

Western Electric Co., Baltimore,

Md. Druback, William A., Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Elevator constructor,

Otis Elevator Co., Bayonne,

N.j. Druener, Hanz Karl, 2nd Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Lt. Col, U.s.

Army, Carlisle Barracks, Pa. Duke, James Edward, Col. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. V.-P.,

Electro-Medics Devices Co.,

Pacific Palisades, Calif. Duncan, John Richard, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Schoolteacher, Quincy,

Ill. Duva, August John, P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne].

Capt., Jersey City Fire Dept.,

Jersey City, N.j. Dwyer, Francis Patrick Thomas, Sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Program

director, Island Trees, N.y. Dwyer, Robert Joseph, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Associate professor

of sociology, University of Lethbridge,

Alberta, Canada, Missoula, Mont. Eason, Bert C., Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. House painter, Phenix

City, Ala. Eatman, Harold Lee, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Customer Services,

Eastern Air Lines, Charlotte, N.c. Eisner, Julius, P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Civil Service,

U.s. Government, Miami, Fla. Elliott, Chester Harding, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Timber worker,

Thomasville, Mo. Eubanks, Henry Edward, P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. Employee,

Blue Bell Packing Co., DuQuoin,

Ill. Felt, Robert H., Tstbled [101/

Airborne]. Asst. train dispatcher,

N.y.C. Transit Authority, West

Hempstead, N.y. Fergie, Charles, Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Retired, Kearney,

N.j. Ferguson, Arthur William, Capt.

[82nd Airborne]. Senior public

health engineer, Warner Robins, Ga. Fielder, Robert Abbott, Lt.
[82nd

Airborne]. Lt. Col. (retired),

U.s. Army, San Pedro, Calif. Finkbeiner, Theodore, Jr., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Capt., Fire Dept.,

Monroe, La. Fischer, Russell W., P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. Senior

instrumentation tech., Shell Development

Corp., Lafayette, Calif. Fitzgerald, John E., P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne].

Data-processing supervisor, Staten

Island Community College,

Staten Island, N.y. Foley, John Paul, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Owner, picture-frame

studio, Durham, N.c. Fosburgh, James Whitney, 2nd Lt.

[9th Troop Carrier Command].

Painter, New York, N.y. Fox, James D., 2nd Lt. (9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Ass't.

to V.-P., Pan American World

Airways, Darien, Conn. Franco, Robert, Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Surgeon, Richland,

Wash. Franks, Darrell James, Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Construction engineer,

Asheville, N.c. Fransosi, Arthur Arnold, Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Postal employee,

Cranston, R.i. French, Donald J., Lt. Col. [82nd

Airborne]. Col. (retired),

U.s. Air Force; trucking and storage

manager, Allied Van Lines,

Vacaville, Calif. Fuller, Clark H., S/sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Cook,

Jamaica, N.y.

Furey, Thomas Patrick, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Col., U.s. Army,

Ryukyu Islands, A.p.o., San

Francisco, Calif. Galvin, Wayne William, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Journeyman painter,

Fairview, Ore. Garber, Dean Landis, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Manager, Personnel and

Labor Relations, Jeffrey Mfg. Co.,

Canal Winchester, O. Gariano, Vincent Paul, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Bus driver, Englewood

Cliffs, N.j. Garofano, Frank P., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Investigator,

Commonwealth of Massachusetts,

Alcoholic Beverages Control Comm.,

Medford, Mass. Garzia, John, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Owner, TV- and

air-conditioning-service business,

Hialeah, Fla. Gatlin, Hershel L., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Farmer, Colfax, La. Gavin, James M., Gen. [82nd

Airborne]. Lt. Gen. (retired),

U.s. Army, Cambridge, Mass. Gelber, Aaron, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Sgt. Major

(retired), U.s. Army insurance agent,

Fayetteville, N.c. Gensemer, Harold Lester, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Sgt. Major, U.s.

Army, Fort Hood, Tex. Gilbertson, Elmer, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Salesman, Wausau,

Wis. Gilliam, Frederick Keene, Flt. Off.

[9th Troop Carrier Command].

C.p.a., Burlington, N.c. Goethe, James H., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Dentist, St. George,

S.c. Gore, Tommy B., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Retired, U.s. Army,

Tahoe Vista, Calif. Gougler, Frederick W., S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Railroad conductor,

Reading Railroad Freight Service,

Clifton Heights, Pa. Grace, Jack, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. High-school art teacher,

Bartlesville, Okla. Graham, Thomas W., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Farmer, Bluffton,

Ind. Gray, William Joseph, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Bus operator,

Vincentown, N.j. Grey, Thomas Charles, Jr., Sgt.

[101/ Airborne]. Rural mail

carrier, Macon, Ga. Hall, Raymond S., Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Retired minister,

Falmouth, Me. Haller, Joseph, Jr., Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Lithographing pressman,

Detroit, Mich. Handelsman, Oliver, Major [101/

Airborne]. Physician,

Pittsburgh, Pa. Hanlon, John Douglas, Major [101/

Airborne]. Newspaper columnist,

Providence Evening Bulletin, Rumford,

R.i. Hanna, Roy M., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Salesman, Berkeley

Heights, N.j. Hannah, Harold W., Lt. Col.

[101/ Airborne]. Law teacher,

writer and researcher, Texico, Ill. Harmon, George E., Tst5 [82nd

Airborne]. Shipping clerk,

Wrightsville, Pa. Harrell, John Daniel, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Druggist, Pensacola,

Fla. Hart, Augustin S., Major [82nd

Airborne]. Exec. V.-P.,

Quaker Oats Company, Lake Forest,

Ill. Hart, Leo Michael, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Manufacturer's

representative, North Miami, Fla. Hauptfleisch, Louis A., Capt.

[82nd Airborne].

V.-P., Halsey, Stuart, and Co.,

Summit, N.j. Heath, Stanley H., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Secretary, Masonic

bodies, Fargo, N.d. Helton, Roy Francis, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. President, J. D.

Helton Roofing Co., Chattanooga,

Tenn. Hennessey, Joseph S., Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Millwright, Farrell

Corp., Beacon Falls, Conn. Herkness, Frank G., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Supervisor,

electrical installations, Railway

Division, Budd Co., Philadelphia,

Pa. Hogenmiller, Joseph James, Cpl.

[101/ Airborne]. Glassworker,

Crystal City, Mo. Holabird, John Augur, Jr., 2nd

Lt. [82nd Airborne]. Architect,

Chicago, Ill.

Hopkins, James Bernard, Flt.

Off. [9th Troop Carrier Command].

Ass't Director, County Health

Dept., St. Petersburg, Fla. Horne, Thomas A., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Pipe fitter,

Newport, Division of Tenneco

Chemicals, Inc., Oakdale, La. Howell, James K., Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. F.b.i.,

Woodbridge, Va. Huebschen, Herbert E., S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Accountant, assistant

office manager, Beatrice Foods Co.,

Wright and Wagner Dairy Division,

Beloit, Wis. Hughart, Robert Ralph, P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. Steelworker,

Kaiser Steel Mill, Fontana,

Calif. Hull, Logan Ben, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Obstetrician and

gynecologist, Altoona, Pa. Hunt, Harold Lawrence, S/sgt.

[101/ Airborne]. U.s. Civil

Service, household-goods

inspector, Petaluma, Calif. Hurtack George J., P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Painting

contractor, Plainfield, N.j. Igoe, Charles M., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Prop man, U.s.

Army film production, Long Branch,

N.j. Ihlenfeld, Edward W., Tstbled [101/

Airborne]. Lieutenant,

Milwaukee Police Department,

Milwaukee, Wis. Ingalls, Wilbur Royce, Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Signalman,

Erie-Lackawanna Railroad,

Wellsville, N.y. Ireland, Alfred Warfield, Jr., Major

[82nd Airborne]. Sales

executive, Woodland Hills, Calif. Irvin, James Morris, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. District manager,

Pendleton Tool Ind., Inc.,

Greensboro, N.c. Isaacs, Jack Roger, Capt.

[82nd Airborne].

Druggist, Coffeyville, Kan. Isenekev, Melvin Wm., Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Rural mail carrier,

Boonville, N.y. Jackson, Schuyler will., P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Trucker,

Bethesda, Md. Jacobs, Herbert, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Physician, Glendora,

Calif. Jakeway, Donald I., S/sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Manager,

Export Orders, Ebco Mfg. Co.,

Johnstown, O. James, Lawrence F., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Motorman, N.y.C.

Transit Authority, Brooklyn,

N.y. Jedrziewski, Anthony A., Capt.

[82nd Airborne]. Electrical

engineer, Belle Vernon, Pa. Johnson, Harry F., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Farmer, Arbuckle,

Calif. Johnson, Joseph Bernard,

Jr., Capt. [101/ Airborne].

Lawyer, Duluth, Minn. Johnson, LeGrand K., Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Regional manager,

Central Region, Ryder Truck Lines,

Atlanta, Ga. Johnson, Paul B., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. V.-P., insurance

company, Ridgefield, Conn. Johnson, Wilton Harold, Cpl.

[82nd Airborne]. Mail carrier,

Palo Alto, Calif. Jones, Alvin, Major [101/

Airborne]. Executive, Jones

Motor Co., Inc., Allentown, Pa. Jones, Delbert Francis, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Mushroom grower,

Avondale, Pa. Jones, Desmond D., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Inspector, Sun Oil

Co., Brookhaven, Pa. Jones, Glynne M., Col. [9th Troop

Carrier Command]. Brig. Gen.

(retired), U.s. Air Force;

Director of Aviation, airport

manager, New Orleans, La. Jones, James Elmo, S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. President, Industrial

Plastics, Inc., and Industrial

Fabricators, Inc., Greensboro,

N.c. Jones, Robert Ellis, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Col., U.s. Army,

Bad Toelz, Germany. Jones, William I., Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Physician, Charlotte,

N.c. Joyner, Jonathan S., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Civil-service

employee, Lawton, Okla. Kaiser, James L., Major [82nd

Airborne]. Col., U.s. Army,

Washington, D.c. Kane, Maurice T., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Police officer,

Buffalo, N.y.

Kantala, Matthew W., Jr., P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. Quarry owner,

Elberton, Ga. Kappel, Carl Wm., Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Col., U.s. Army,

Springfield, Va. Kartus, Charles Leroy, S/sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Merchant, Rock Hill,

S.c. Keefe, Jack Edward III, Lt.

[82nd Airborne]. Physician,

Miami Shores, Fla. Keenan, James E., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Ass't V.-P.,

Chemical Bank, Hicksville, N.y. Keep, Henry, Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Hospital

administrator, Villanova, Pa. Keith, Herbert Paul, P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Tavern owner,

Newcomerstown, O. Keith, John Marvin, T/sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Repairman and installer,

Mountain States Tel. and Tel. Co.,

Stevensville, Mont. Keller, John William, P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne].

Toolmaker, Sea Cliff,

N.y. Kinnard, Harry William Osburn, Lt.

Col. [101/ Airborne]. Lt.

Gen., U.s. Army, Ft. Belvoir,

Va. Kirkwood, Robert S., Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Lt. Col., U.s.

Army (retired); senior auditor,

N.y. Telephone Co., New York,

N.y. Kissane, Joseph M., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Public accountant,

Greenlawn, N.y. Kjell, Clifford George, Capt.

[101/ Airborne]: Letter carrier,

Rockford, Ill. Klein, Richard Lionel, Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. High-school teacher,

Huron, O. Knox, Clyde F., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Sgt. Major, U.s.

Army, Fayetteville, N.c. Koch, Stuart H., T/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. General agent,

Northwestern Mutual Life

Insurance Co., Appleton, Wis. Kogut, Michael J., 1/ Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. V.-P., International

Molders and Allied Workers Union,

AFL-CIO-CLC, Ludlow, Mass. Komosa, Adam A, Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Lt. Col. (retired),

U.s. Army; professor, North

Michigan Univ., Jeffersonville,

Ind. Kos, Rudolph, P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Antique dealer,

Deerfield, Ill. Kotary, William E., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Agency Dept.

Philadelphia Life Insurance Co.,

Wayne, Pa. Kough, Frank L., Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Correctional officer,

Western Penitentiary, Pittsburgh, Pa. Krantz, Eugene A., P.f.c.
[101/

Airborne]. Works supervisor,

Chicago, Ill. Krebs, Frank X., Lt. Col.

[9th Troop Carrier Command].

Legislative ass't to Senator

Cannon, Falls Church, Va. Kremer, Jean Harry, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Salesman, Westbury,

N.y. Kroener, Walter B., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Battalion chief,

Huntington Park Fire Dept. and Asst.

Civil Defense Director, Huntington

Park, Calif. Kuehl, Delbert A., Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Executive Asst.

Director, Foreign Missions, Elmhurst,

Ill. Kumler, Lyle Kay, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Insurance business,

Gibson City, Ill. Lachkovic, John Paul, P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Truck driver,

Hagerstown, Md. La Magdeleine, Leslie Leo, Pvt.

[101/ Airborne]. Die setter,

Mundelein, Ill. Lange, William A., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Tenant farmer,

Pleasant Plains, Ill. Langston, Ledford M., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Industrial employee,

Red Banks, Miss. Lappegaard, Ray Lenard, Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Director of organization

and personnel, Toro Manufacturing

Corp., St. Paul, Minn. La Riviere, Richard G., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Construction superintendent,

Chicopee Falls, Mass. Larkin, Bernard L., Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Beer distributor,

Levittown, Pa. Lassen, Donald Douglas, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Plant mgr., Henderson

Portion Pak., Miami, Fla. Lazenby, Harvill W., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. V.a. Hospital

staff, Nashville, Tenn. Lee, John C. H., Jr., Capt.

[82nd Airborne]. Director,

Office of Appalachian Studies,

Cincinnati, O. Leebrick, Frank Lee, Jr.,

Cpl. [101/ Airborne]. Letter

carrier, Silver Spring, Md. Lewis, Mike, Tstbled [101/

Airborne]. Services machine tools

for the Bendix Corp., North Hollywood,

Calif. Lillyman, Frank Lewis, Capt.

[101/ Airborne]. Deputy

Operations Officer, U.s. Army Infantry

School, Fort Benning, Ga. Lindberg, John Albert, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Sales representative,

Oklahoma City, Okla. Looney, Frank J., Tstbled [101/

Airborne]. Tavern owner, Albany,

N.y. Loveland, Glenn E., S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Employee, Board of

Education, Shelby, O. Luiz, Charles, Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Engineering technician,

Federal Aviation Administration, Manchester,

N.h. Macchia, Rocco L., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Real estate,

Ozone Park, N.y. Machol, Robert Leonard, Tst5 [82nd

Airborne]. Electrical foreman for

Mafco Electric Co., of West

Hartford, Simsbury, Conn. Mackey, Leonard Snow, Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Runs mineral and lapidary

shop, Colton, N.y. MacLeod, Tom, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Postmaster, Columbia,

S.c. Macationees, Frank J., Col. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Col.

(retired), U.s. Air Force; rancher,

Travelers Rest, S.c. Maltese, Edward Vincent, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Col., U.s. Army,

Washington, D.c. Mansolillo, Nicholas W., Pvt.

[82nd Airborne]. Works

employee, Providence, R.i. Marohn, Robert E., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Detective

Lieutenant, Tonawanda Police

Dept., Tonawanda, N.y. Martin, J. Roy, Jr., Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Roofing contractor,

Anderson, S.c. Martin, Orville S., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Laborer, Methyl Ware

Corp., Two Rivers, Wis. Mason, Charles W., M/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Airborne Historian,

Fort Bragg, Fayetteville, N.c. Massei, Ernest Lawrence, Jr., Sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. President,

Cape Fear Car Service Co.,

Fayetteville, N.c. Mastrangelo, William, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Tavern owner,

Philadelphia, Pa. McCarthy, John T., M/sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Employee of

photoengraving plant, purchasing, estimating

and billing, Chicago, Ill. McClain, Allen French, III, Lt.

[82nd Airborne]. City fireman,

Coral Gables, Fla. McDavid, James Earl, P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne].

Construction superintendent, Hayward,

Calif. McElfresh, John F., P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Clerk of

Circuit Court, Deeds, Knox County,

Edina, Mo. McFadden, Frank J., Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Lt. Col. (retired),

U.s. Army; Deputy Director,

Tattnall County Civil Defense

Unit, Reidsville, Ga. McGilvra, LaVerne Russell,

P.f.c. [82nd Airborne].

Beekeeper, Baraboo, Wis. McGinnis, Arthur J., P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Probation officer

and real-estate broker, Elkridge, Md. McIlvoy, Daniel B., Major
[82nd

Airborne]. Medical doctor,

pediatrician, Bowling Green, Ky. McIntosh, Ben Charles, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Utility man for Board of

Education, Bartlesville, Okla. McKeage, Donald Wm., Pvt.

[82nd Airborne].

Construction superintendent, Hemlock,

Mich. McKearney, Bernard J., Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Ass't. Supt. of

Schools, Hingham, Mass. McMandon, William T., Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Branch manager, Singer

Company, Miami, Fla.

Mcationiece, Jake, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Post office clerk,

Ponca City, Okla. Meddaugh, William J., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Personnel specialist,

I.b.m. Corp., Hyde Park,

N.y. Megellas, James, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. D.s.c., Director,

U.s. A.i.d. mission to Panama,

Balboa, C.z. Merlano, Louis P., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. District sales manager,

Hermes Business Machines Paillard

Inc., Levittown, Pa. Meyer, Ralph F., Pvt.

[101/ Airborne]. Union

official and salesman, San Francisco,

Calif. Meyers, James Joseph, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Col., U.s. Army,

Columbia, S.c. Miller, Michael G., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Mailman, Edison,

N.j. Miller, Walter Leroy, Jr., Capt.

[101/ Airborne]. National

Secretary Treasurer, 101/ Airborne

Div. Ass'n., Greenville, Tex. Millsaps, Woodrow Wilson, Lt.

[82nd Airborne]. Lt. Col.

(retired), U.s. Army; civil

service, Columbus, Ga. Mitchell, Charles A., S/sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Insurance consultant,

sales director, Talladega, Ala. Mitchell, Edward J., Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Air-mail dispatcher,

Oshkosh, Wis. Moe, Glenn Allen, Pvt.

[101/ Airborne].

Sheet-metal mechanic, Toppenish,

Wash. Morrison, Thomas J., Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Advertising-specialty

business operator, Ambler, Pa. Mulloy, Patrick J., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Employment counselor,

Gary, Ind. Mulvey, Thomas Paris, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Real-estate broker,

stocks and bonds, Clarksville, Tenn. Murphy, Ernest P., 2nd Lt.
[82nd

Airborne]. Law-enforcement officer,

Kissimmee, Fla. Murphy, James J., Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Salesman,

Indianapolis, Ind. Nadler, Philip H., Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Supervisor, Reichbold

Chemicals, Inc., Westwood, N.j. Neill, Robert W., 2nd Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Retail-furniture

dealer, Pullman, Wash. Nichols, Mickey, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Insurance agent,

Philadelphia, Pa. Nickrent, Roy Walter, S/sgt.

[101/ Airborne]. Town marshal and

waterworks Supt. for village, Saybrook,

Ill. Nicoll, Kenneth S., S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Ironworker, Montgomery,

Tex. Norris, James Sherley, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Welder, Roanoke,

Va. Nunan, Paul D., S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Sgt. Major, U.s.

Army, Syracuse, N.y. Oakley, Herbert L., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Dry cleaner,

Columbus, O. Oatman, William John, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Truck driver,

Lancaster, Pa. O'Connell, Robert Philip, 2nd Lt.

[101/ Airborne]. National accounts

manager, Group Hospitalization, Inc.,

Bowie, Md. O'Hagan, Patrick J., Pvt.

[82nd Airborne]. Civil

service, N.y.C. Transit Authority,

Brooklyn, N.y. Oldfather, Earl Shively, Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Banking officer, Toledo

Trust Company, Toledo, O. Olsen, William S., Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Asst. to the President,

Florida Mobile Home Assoc.,

Madeira Beach, Fla. Olson, Charles Ray, S/sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Asst. superintendent of the

composing room of the Jamestown (N.y.)

Post-Journal, Lakewood, N.y. Olson, Hugo, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Attorney, Moorehead,

Minn. O'ationeal, Russell Roy, S/sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Restaurant

owner, San Anselmo, Calif. Osborne, Ernest William, Sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Material

expediter, Union Carbide, Charleston,

W. Va. Parker, Arthur, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Retired fire fighter;

television technician, St. Petersburg,

Fla. Paterson, Charles, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Safety supervisor,

Armour Agricultural Chemical Co.,

Winter Haven, Fla. Patton, Donald Vickrey, Acting Sgt.

[101/ Airborne]. Architect,

Allen, Patton and Associates,

Rockford, Ill. Pearson, Donald T., S/sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Supervisory Plant

Quarantine Inspector, U.s. Dept of

Agriculture, Bayside, N.y. Peterson, Theodore L., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Manufacturers'

representative, Bloomfield Hills,

Mich. Phillips, Robert Hamilton, Capt.

[101/ Airborne]. V.-P.,

Trust Company of Georgia, Atlanta,

Ga. Pickens, Oren Clinton, Sgt.

[82nd Airborne].

Postal employee, Homestead, Fla. Piper, Robert M., Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Col., U.s. Army,

A.p.o., San Francisco, Calif. Prescott, William L., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Artist, San Miguel

de Allenda, G.t.o., Mexico. Pritikin, Marvin E., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. President, Illinois

Mutual Fire Insurance Co., Chicago,

Ill. Prow, Robert F., T/sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Manager of a

Pennsylvania state liquor store,

Ambler, Pa. Purcell, Warren Carver, P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Farmer;

Deputy Commissioner of Revenue,

Petersburg, Va. Quirici, Oreste, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Manager, Physical

Testing Laboratory, Kaiser Steel,

Rutherford, Calif. Ragland, Robert Eugene, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Western

regional sales manager, Baldwin,

Ehret, Hill Inc., Los Angeles,

Calif. Randall, Charles H., Jr., Pvt.

[101/ Airborne]. Highway

engineering technician, Los Altos,

Calif. Rankin, William J., S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Carpenter, Kingman,

Ariz. Richards, Theodore S., Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Sgt. Major,

USARSO, Canal Zone, Ft. Amador,

C.z. Richardson, William King, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Employee, Veterans

Administration, Columbia, S.c Richmond, William K., Flt. Off.

[9th Troop Carrier Command].

Building-maintenance employee,

Hicksville, N.y. Ridgeway, Matthew B., Maj. Gen.

[XVIII Corps]. General

(retired), U.s. Army,

Pittsburgh, Pa. Rippel, John Kenneth, P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Director,

Electronics Mfg., Baltimore,

Md. Roberts, James J., Col. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Col.

(retired), U.s. Air Force, Santa

Barbara, Calif. Rocca, Francis A., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Machine operator,

Pittsfield, Mass. Rohr, Willis F., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Carpenter, Hinsdale,

Ill. Rosemond, St. Julien P., Capt.

[101/ Airborne]. First Asst.

County Attorney, Miami, Fla. Rosenthal, Hillel Z., P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. Salesman,

St. Louis, Mo. Rosinski, Harry F., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Auto mechanic,

Garfield Heights, O. Ruppe, Frank, Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Dental

laboratory technician, Maspeth,

N.y. Ryals, Robert Wilson, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Sgt. Major, U.s.

Army, Trenton, N.j. Sampson, Francis Leon, Capt.

(chaplain) [101/ Airborne].

Brig. Gen., Deputy Chief of

Chaplains, U.s. Army, Arlington,

Va. Sampson, Otis Little, S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Water company employee,

Palm Springs, Calif.

Sanders, Gus L., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Retired postmaster,

Springdale, Ark. Santarsiero, Charles J., Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Pennsylvania Power and

Light Co., Scranton, Pa. Scanlon, Wilbur J., 1/ Sgt.

[82nd Airborne].

Customer-service manager, General

Electric Supply Co.,

Baton Rouge, La. Sucheaffer, John E., 2nd Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Dairy sales manager,

Camp Hill, Pa. Schmalz, Charles Edward, Tst5 [82nd

Airborne]. Laborer, Wheeling

Steel, Steubenville, O. Schmidt, Nicholas, Tstbled [101/

Airborne]. Teacher of English and

journalism, Twinsburg, O. Schneider, Frank, P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Machine operator,

Downers Grove, Ill. Schrader, Clifford W., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Construction foreman,

Hoffman Esstates, Ill. Schultz, Arthur B., Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Counselor-therapist,

San Diego, Calif. Schwaber, Sanford, P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. President, S. and M.

Quality Foods, and Tasty Mix

Products, Brooklyn, N.y. Schwartz, John J., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Fireman, Rochester,

N.y. Schweiter, Leo Henry, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Brig. Gen., C.o.,

173rd Airborne, A.p.o., San

Francisco, Calif. Schwerin, William Fred, Jr., Tst5

[101/ Airborne]. Medical

doctor, Pittsburgh, Pa. Searrin, William D., Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Bell Flower, Calif. Sefakis, Manuel John, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Worcester, Mass. Sessions, Myron Guy, Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. College instructor,

Spokane, Wash. Shapiro, Hyman D., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Ear, nose and throat

specialist, East Lansing, Mich. Shennum, Merlin J., Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Farmer, Brockway,

Mont. Shepard, Robert B., Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Honda motorcycles,

Memphis, Tenn. Shoemaker, Charles Harry, Sgt.

[101/ Airborne].

Maintenance section of National Park

Service, Boulder City, Nev. Shutt, Harry G., Jr., M/sgt.

[101/ Airborne]. Construction

superintendent, Shreveport, La. Siegmann, George A., 1/ Sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. District sales

manager, Temple Terrace, Fla. Simmons, Cecil Lee, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Traffic engineer for City

of Grand Rapids and Commanding General of

Michigan National Guard, Grand Rapids,

Mich. Smith, Ralph R., Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Post-office clerk, St.

Petersburg, Fla. Smith, Raymond, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Owner and president of

Smith-Elkhorn Coal Co., Thornton,

Ky. Smith, William F., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Gas and Electric

Utilities, New Castle, Del. Soper, Erwin J., Jr., P.f.c.

[307th Engineers]. Erection

superintendent, Haarmann Steel Co.,

Feeding Hills, Mass. Speck, Roger Donald, Pvt. [82nd

Airborne]. Southern Bell

Telephone Co. and V.-P. of Local

3204, Communication Workers of America,

Atlanta, Ga. Stach, Stanfield August, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Retired, disability,

Houston, Tex. Stallbories, Robert Henry, Chief

Warrant Officer [82nd Airborne].

Life insurance agent, Equitable Life

Assurance Society, Tulsa, Okla. Steed, James Thomas, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Marketing manager,

Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph

Co., Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Steele, John M., * S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Retired, Wilmington,

N.c. Stein, Lester, Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Eye surgeon,

Steubenville, O. Steinfield, Manfred, S/sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Furniture

manufacturer, Skokie, Ill.

Strayer, Robert L., Lt. Col. [101/

Airborne]. Insurance executive,

Springfield, Delaware County, Pa. Strieter, William L., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Real-estate broker,

Arlington, Va. Strunk, Willard M., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Carpet-store owner,

Wheatridge, Colo. Sult, Vernon Ralph, S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Liquor salesman,

Granada Hills, Calif. Swanson, James A., Flt. Off. [9th

Troop Carrier Command].

Material-control manager, Industrial

Corporation, Park Forest, Ill. Swanson, Wallace Albert, Capt.

[101/ Airborne] Geologist;

general foreman and supervisor with W. S.

Dickey Clay Mfg. Co.,

Fairfield, Ala. Sweeney, Neil J., Capt.

[101/ Airborne]. Civil

service, Villa Park, Ill. Sweeney, Patrick J., Sstbled [101/

Airborne]. Public-relations

coordinator, Wappinger Falls, N.y. Taft, Chester Weldon, P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne].

Millwright-machinist, Seneca Army

Depot, Clyde, N.y. Tallerday, Jack, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Col., U.s. Army,

Fort Bragg, N.c. Tallon, Robert M., Sr., S/sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Department-store

owner-manager, Dillon, S.c. Tarbell, Albert A., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Ironworks employee,

Nedrow, N.y. Taylor, Frank Curtis, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Retired, Albuquerque,

N.m. Taylor, John H., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Paint and floor-covering

contractor and retail-store owner,

Lufkin, Tex. Taylor, Maxwell D., Maj. Gen.

[C.o., 101/ Airborne].

General, Chief of Staff (retired),

U.s. Army. Taylor, Ray Edward, S/sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Plasterer, Ashtabula,

O. Thain, Carl Ernest, Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Contractor, McAlester,

Okla. Tisdale, Paul Arthur, Lt. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Col.,

U.s. Army, Arlington, Va. Tomardy, Bernard Joseph, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Washington Gas and Light

Co., Vienna, Va. Travers, Thomas R., 2nd Lt. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Operator van

and storage company, Berkeley, Calif. Tremble, Leonard G., P.f.c.
[82nd

Airborne]. Staff assistant,

petroleum company, Fort Worth, Tex. Tribe, Robert Wayne, Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Specialist, U.s.

Bureau of Reclamation,

Sacramento, Calif. Truax, Kenneth W., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Agency manager, rural

insurance companies, Wisconsin Farm

Bureau affiliate, Ettrick, Wis. Tucker, Reuben H., * Col. [82nd

Airborne]. Administrative department

of The Citadel, Charleston, S.c. Tucker, William Humphrey, Jr.,

Sgt. [82nd Airborne].

Attorney; formerly Chairman, U.s

Interstate Commerce Commission, Washington,

D.c. Tyler, John Norman, Major [101/

Airborne]. (Retired), Cleveland,

Tenn. Vandervoort, Benjamin Hays, Lt. Col.

[82nd Airborne]. Col.

(retired), U.s. Army, Hilton Head

Island, S.c. Van Duzer, Franklin Kenneth, S/sgt.

[101/ Airborne]. Owner of

Ris-Van Realty Co., V.-P.,

Community National Bank;

director, Guardsman Life

Insurance Co., Clear Lake, Iowa. Van Ort, Richard M., Cpl. [82nd

Airborne]. Truck driver,

Summit, Ill. Vanpoyck, Walter S., Capt. [82nd

Airborne]. Administrative officer,

Eastern Air Lines, Miami, Fla. Vantrease, Glen Wilson, Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. C.p.a., Gary,

Ind. Veach, Donald, P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Farmer, Manila, Ark.

Vest, Hansford C., Sr., Cpl. [101/

Airborne]. Machinist, Boeing Co.,

Renton, Wash. Vuletich, Michael, S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Steelworker, South

Holland, Ill. Wade, James Melvin, 2nd Lt.

[82nd Airborne]. Lt. Col.,

U.s. Army, Fort Bragg, N.c. Wagner, Richard Paul, S/sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Electric welder,

Baraboo, Wis. Waldt, Anthony M., P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Clerk, Aberdeen,

S.d. Webster, Leonard J., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Heating and air-conditioning

engineer, Milwaukee, Wis. Weil, Bernard L., Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Manager, furniture

store, Norfolk, Va. Weinberg, Stanley, 2nd Lt. [82nd

Airborne]. Haberdasher, Jersey

City, N.j. Wellems, Edward N., Major [82nd

Airborne]. Col., U.s. Army,

Ft. Lewis, Wash. Welshons, Don R., Sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Minister, Sunland, Los

Angeles, Calif. Wetsig, Chester J., S/sgt. [101/

Airborne]. Micro-electronic

engineering at General Electric Co.,

Marcy, N.y. Whitacre, William B., Col. [9th

Troop Carrier Command].

Retired V.-P., American

Airlines, Hot Springs, Ark. White, Myron A., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Farmer, Grinnell,

Iowa Wienecke, Robert H., Lt. Col.

[82nd Airborne]. Major Gen.

(retired), U.s. Army; consultant and

director of insurance company, Ventura,

Calif. Wierzbowski, Edmund L., Lt. [101/

Airborne]. Special

representative, insurance sales,

Chicago, Ill. (Note: Uses name

Edmund L. Weir for business.) Wilder, Thomas Patten, Capt. [101/

Airborne]. Yacht consultant,

Balboa, Calif. Williams, Adriel N., Col. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Brig. Gen.,

U.s. Air Force, Washington, D.c. Williams, John Henry, Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Instructor in

R.o.t.c. program at Central High

School, Chattanooga, Tenn. Williams, Warren R., Jr.,

Lt. Col. [82nd Airborne].

Director, U.s. Army Board for

Aviation Accident Research, Fort Rucker,

Ala. Winton, Walter Farrell, Jr., Lt.

Col. [82nd Airborne]. Brig.

Gen., U.s. Army, Annandale, Va. Woll, Shepherd, P.f.c. [101/

Airborne]. Owner, Wholesale Drug

Sundries, Rockville Centre,

N.y. Womack, Waymon W., Pvt. [101/

Airborne]. Dow Chemical,

Freeport, Tex. Wood, Rev. George B., D.d.,

Capt. [82nd Airborne].

Rector of Trinity Episcopal Church,

Fort Wayne, Ind. Wood, Leslie Earl, 1/ Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Laboratory

technician, Wunda Weve Carpet Co.,

Travelers Rest, S.c. Wurst, Spencer F., Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Laboratory

technician, General Electric

Co., and Lt. Col., National Guard,

Erie, Pa. Wyngaert, Julius A., P.f.c.

[82nd Airborne]. U.s. Army,

3Do Special Forces, Fayetteville,

N.c. Yates, Gorden Wyatt, S/sgt.

[101/ Airborne]. Assistant

produce manager in a supermarket.

Attends college nights, Phoenix,

Ariz. Yedenock, William, Jr., S/sgt.

[82nd Airborne]. Insurance

broker, Berwyn, Pa. Yeiter, Robert D., P.f.c. [82nd

Airborne]. Restaurateur,

Traverse City, Mich. Young, Charles H., Lt. Col. [9th

Troop Carrier Command]. Commercial

airlines captain, Grapevine, Tex. Zagol, Walter Frank, P.f.c.

[101/ Airborne]. State

instructor, savings-bank life insurance,

Taunton, Mass. Zakby, Abdallah K., Major

[82nd Airborne]. Middle-East

representative, tractor company,

A.p.o., New York 09694.

Zapalski, Daniel J., 1/ Sgt.

[101/ Airborne]. Retired Army

officer, field representative for

Prudential Savings and Loan Association,

Rosemead, Calif. Ziegler, Roland C., 1/ Sgt. [82nd

Airborne]. Electrician,

Baraboo, Wis. BRITISH Montgomery, Sir Bernard Law, Field

Marshal [21/ Army Group].

Viscount Montgomery of Alamein,

K.g., retired, Hampshire. Adair, Allan, Maj. Gen. [Guards

Armoured]. C.v.o., C.b.,

D.s.o., M.c., General, British

Army, retired, London. Allsop, D., Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Transport and dairy

manager, Pontesbury, nr.

Shrewsbury. Anson, Geoffrey F., Capt. [Guards

Armoured]. M.c., Area manager, Ford

Motor Credit Co., Ltd., London. Ashington, George, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Tool setter operator,

Birmingham. Ashley, Neville L., Sgt.

[1/ Airborne]. Teacher, Cheshire. Ashworth, Walton, S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Watchmaker,

Essex. Atwell, Douglas, S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Valuer,

Somersetshire. Austin, John Edward, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Civil servant,

Surrey. Axford, James Alfred, L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Postman, Kent. Back, Harold E., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Post-office clerk,

London. Bagguley, Reginald, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Snack-bar proprietor,

Staffordshire. Ball, Donald, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Ambulance driver,

Yorkshire. Barclay, W. J. J., Pvt.

[Pathfinder, 1/ Airborne].

M.m., Major, Ndola, Zambia. Barnes, Frank, Sgt.

[Guards Armoured]. Hospital clerk,

Belfast. Barnett, J. Patrick, Lt. [1/

Airborne]. Golf club secretary,

Kent. Barry, Peter, Lt. [1/ Airborne].

Medical doctor, Somerset. Basnett, Edward F., Sgt. Pilot

[Glider Pilot Regt.].

Housemaster, Home Office Boys

School, Salop. Baylis, George Sidney, S/sgt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. Cargo

superintendent, Kent. Beckett, Sir Martyn, Capt. [Welsh

Guards]. Architect, London. Bedford, Ronald G., FirstSgt.

(r.a.f.]. Salesman, Torquay,

Devonshire. Beech, James W. A., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Agricultural store

manager, Spalding, Lincolnshire. Bennett, Clifford J., Guardsman

[Guards Armoured]. Grocery

manager, Rugby. Bennett, Frederick C., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Stock audit, Redditch,

Worcestershire. Bennett, Henry, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Stockbroker's messenger,

London. Bentley, Thomas C., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Warrant Officer,

British Army Recruiting, Nottingham. Binick, Norman, Sgt.
[Pathfinder, 1/

Airborne]. Entertainer, London,

S.w. 14. Blunt, John Graham, Lt. [1/

Airborne]. Major, Zambia

Regiment, Ndola, Zambia. Blyton, Henry, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Plant operator,

Lancashire. Boldock, Walter, J. P., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Rodent operator,

Lincolnshire. Boulding, George H. W., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Printing-machine minder,

Kent. Bowden, T. D. L., Trooper

Signalman [1/ Airborne].

Manager, the National Kenya

Sweepstake, Nairobi, Kenya. Bowers, Reverend Raymond E., Chaplain

[1/ Airborne]. Parish priest,

Richmond Place, Bath. Bowles, Dennis A., Signaller [1/

Airborne]. Analytical chemist,

Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. Brace, Terry, Cpl./medic [1/

Airborne]. Storekeeper, Kent. Breese, C. F. O., Major [1/

Airborne]. Brigadier, retired;

Company director, Yorkshire.

Breitmeyer, Alan N., Lt. [Grenadier

Guards]. Colonel, commander, Grenadier

Guards, London, S.w. 1. Bridgewater, William George, Sgt.

Major [Glider Pilot Regt.].

Petworth, Sussex. Briggs, Bernard W., Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Lt. Col., British

Army (retired), Dortmund

Station, B.f.p.o. 20. Brook, Henry, L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Bank messenger, nr.

Manchester. Brown, Francis Edward, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Porter, British

Railways, Yorkshire. Bruce, David, Capt. [Guards

Armoured]. Stock jobber, London,

S.w. 10. Bruce, Joseph Morrison, Sgt.

[Irish Guards]. Retired, Belfast

13. Bryant, Reginald, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Printing engineer, Bristol

5. Buchanan-Jardine, Rupert, Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. M.c., Farmer,

Dumfriesshire. Burton, Arthur Edwin, Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Assistant superannuation

officer, Leicestershire. Butcher, John M., W/sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Works manager,

Manchester. Cain, Robert, * Major C.o.

[1/ Airborne]. V. C.,

Retired, Oxted, Surrey. Callaghan, Harry, Sgt. Major [1/

Airborne]. O. B. L., Civil

servant, Aldershot, Hampshire. Campbell, Alexander Wm., Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Patrolman, County

Durham. Campbell, Gordon, S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Order clerk,

Workington, Cumberland. Campbell, P., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Motor parts manager,

Johannesburg, South Africa. Cannon, Brian Frank, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Engineering foreman,

Luton, Bedfordshire. Carr, B. D., Lt. [1/ Airborne].

Supervisor, trust company, Vancouver,

British Columbia. Cassie, James, Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Bookbinder, Edinburgh

11, Scotland. Cawrey, Victor F., Pvt.

[Pathfinder, 1/ Airborne].

Haulage contractor, Leicestershire. Chandler, William F., Trooper
[1/

Airborne]. Instrument maker,

London, S.e., 24. Chapman, Harry A., W/s/sgt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.].

Electrical contracts manager,

Cyncoed, Cardiff, Wales. Chatterton, George S., Col. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Retired brigadier,

London, N.w. 8. Chennell, William, Cpl. [Guards

Armoured]. Carpenter, London, S.e.

4. Christie, Gordon, Sapper [1/

Airborne]. Bricklayer, nr.

Spalding, Lincolnshire. Christie, Robert K., Gunner [1/

Airborne]. Life-insurance agency

superintendent, Surrey. Christie, Valentine Brock, Flying Officer

[Royal Canadian Air Force].

Grain farmer, Alberta, Canada. Clark, R. J., Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Bank

economic adviser, Hertfordshire. Clegg, Benjamin B., Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Managing director,

Sheffield. Clegg, Eric, Gunner [1/

Airborne]. Universal miller,

engineering workshop, Lancashire. Cleminson, James A. S., Lt. [1/

Airborne]. Company director,

Norfolk. Cockrill, James D., Signalman

[1/ Airborne]. Police sergeant,

Norfolk. Cole, C. V., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Carpenter, North

Queensland, Australia. Coles, C. J., Cpl. [Guards

Armoured]. Major, Royal Guards,

Windsor, Berkshire. Consett, William L., Major [Guards

Armoured]. Retired, London. Conway, James J., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Driver, Ministry of

Aviation, Camberley, Surrey. Cook, Ralph, Gunner [1/

Airborne]. Chemical operator,

Grimsby, Lincolnshire. Cooper, Derek G. D., Capt. Major

[Guards Armoured]. County Donegal,

Ireland. Cooper, Frederick S., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Driver, Hornsy

Rise, London N. 19.

Copley, Stanley G., Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Public-relations

executive, Henley-in-Arden,

Warwickshire. Corrie, Michael T., Capt.

[R.a.f. Glider Pilot].

Produce broker, London, S.w.

1. Cosadinos, George, Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Barber, Stockport,

Cheshire. Cosgrove, David Thomas, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Trimmer, motor works,

Luton, Bedfordshire. Cox, Alan Harvey, Lt. [1/

Airborne]. Lt. Col.,

British Army, Warrington, Lancashire. Cox, David, Pvt. [1/
Airborne].

Machine-shop inspector, Hemel

Hempstead, Hertfordshire. Cox, Ronald Charles Percy, Pvt.

[1/ Airborne]. G.p.o.

engineer, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. Crawley, Douglas E., Major
[1/

Airborne]. Lt. Col., NATO,

Kols@as, Norway. Creswell, J. N., Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. Lloyd's underwriter, nr.

Polegate, Sussex. Cronk, Frederick J., W/o Pilot

[R.a.f.]. Coach works director,

Nottinghamshire. Crook, John W., L/bombardier [1/

Airborne]. Police sergeant,

Shipley, Yorkshire. Dakin, John Leslie, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Telephone engineer,

Spalding, Lincolnshire. Dalton, Austin D., FirstSgt.

[R.a.f.]. Compositor,

Linotype operator, Belfast. Daniells, Frederick T., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Engineer, Dunstable,

Bedfordshire. Dauncey, Michael D. K., Lt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. Lt.

Col., British Army, Latimer,

Chesham, Buckinghamshire. Davey, Harold Leonard, C.q.m.s.

[1/ Airborne]. Shopkeeper, nr.

Selby, Yorkshire. Davis, George E., S/sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Marketing (sales

promotion) N.s.w., Australia. Dawson, Alan, Pvt. [Pathfinders, 1/

Airborne]. Company director,

Wrington, nr. Bristol. Dawson, John Harold, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Tool setter,

Wolverhampton, Staffordshire. Dent, Ralph, Pvt. [1/ Airborne].

Police sergeant, Scarborough,

Yorkshire. Demetriadi, Springet, Capt.

[Phantom Net]. Member, London

Stock Exchange, London,

E.c. 2. Deane-Drummond, Anthony, Major [1/

Airborne]. D.s.o., M.c.,

Maj. Gen., Commander, 3rd Infantry

Division, Tidworth, Hampshire. Dixon, George, Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Production engineer,

Crawley, Sussex. Doggart, James, L/cpl. [Guards

Armoured]. R.q.m.s. of Irish

Guards, Birdcage Walk, London,

S.w. 1. Downing, Robert W., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. High-voltage cable

jointer, Northampton. Drew, James R., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Engineer, Stafford,

Staffordshire. Driver, John, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Catering officer,

Ashton-under-Lyne. Dullforce, Alfred J., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Stockroom manager,

London. Dunn, Pat., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Coal merchant,

Leicestershire. Eagger, Dr. A. Austin, A.d.m.s.

[1/ Airborne]. Retired medical

doctor, Exeter, Devonshire. Edwards, Jimmy, F.o. [R.a.f.].

Entertainer, Uckfield, Sussex. Edwards, Robert C. S., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Heavy-goods driver, nr.

Coventry. Edwards, Roy Norris, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Electrician's mate,

Barry, Glamorganshire, Wales. Egan, Rev. Friend. Bernard M.,
Chaplain

[1/ Airborne]. Headmaster,

Wimbledon College Preparatory

School, London. Ellwood, Richard A., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Gas board staff

officer, Hammersmith, London. Emery, Ronald T., Sapper [1/

Airborne]. Decorator, London.

Essame, Hubert, Brigadier

[43rd Infantry Div.]. C.b.e.,

D.s.o., M.c., Retired Major

General, N. Chichester. Fairclough, Thomas, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Civil servant,

Lancashire. Falconer, Edward, Guardsman [Guards

Armoured]. Laborer, Montrose,

Angus, Scotland. Faulkner, Maurice A., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Gear cutter, Tamworth,

Staffordshire. Fenge, William J., Sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Builder, London,

S.w. 17. Fieldhouse, Stanley, Gunner [1/

Airborne]. Tailor's cutter,

Leeds 16, Yorkshire. Firkins, Harold J., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Director, insurance

brokers, Kings Heath, Birmingham 14. FitzGerald, Desmond R. S.,
Major

[Guards Armoured]. Merchant banker,

London. Fitzpatrick, Francis "Pat,"

Sgt. [1/ Airborne]. Office

manager, Coulsdon, Surrey. Formoy, Leonard, Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Depot manager for

sports manufacturer, London, S.e.

11. Foster, Raymond H., Sapper [1/

Airborne]. Shoe repairman,

Farnham, Surrey. Frater, Les J., S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Civil servant,

Weston-super-Mare, Somersetshire. Freemantle, Albert, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Superintendent, British

South Africa Police, Rhodesia. Frost, John D., Lt. Col. [1/

Airborne]. Retired Major

General, Oxshott, Surrey. Gammon, Peter John F., Sgt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. Chartered

surveyor, Woking, Surrey. Garfield, Frank, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Transport driver,

Birmingham. Gatland, George, Sgt. Major

[1/ Airborne]. Technical

assistant, London Street Lighting,

Wembley, Middlesex. Gay, Robert D., Sgt. Major [1/

Airborne]. Construction manager,

Burgh Heath, Surrey. George, J. H., Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Metal engineer,

Australia. Gibbons, Eric R., Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Off-license manager,

London, N. 7. Gibbons, Leslie N., S/sgt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. Sales

representative, B.e.a. Airways,

Warwickshire. Gibbons, Harry A., S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Stock controller,

Chippenham, Wiltshire. Gillie, Thomas, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Building foreman,

Darlington, County Durham. Glover, J. W., Lt/Qm [1/

Airborne]. Retired Lt.

Col., British Army

Administration, York, Yorkshire. Glover, Richard, Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Company representative,

Driffield, Yorkshire. Goldthorpe, Lawrence, Sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt]. Government service,

Surrey. Gordon-Watson, Michael, Major

[Guards Armoured]. O.b.e.,

M.c., Stud manager, farmer,

Dorsetshire. Gorman, John, Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. C.v.o., M.b.e.,

M.c., personnel director,

B.o.a.c., Sussex. Gough, C. F. H., Major [1/

Airborne]. Insurance broker and company

director, Lodsworth, Sussex. Goulburn, Edward H., Lt. Col.

[Guards Armoured]. Retired Major

General, Surrey. Grafton, James, Major [43rd

Division]. TV script writer,

company director, Strutton Ground,

London. Grainger, Robert E., Co. Sgt. Major

[1/ Airborne]. M.b.e.,

Racing manager, Greyhound Stadium,

nr. Stroud, Gloucestershire. Gray, Donald James, Signalman

[1/ Airborne]. Builder,

Cleethorpes, Lancashire. Green, P. J., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Slatter, Morayshire,

Scotland. Green, Thomas C., S/sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Head remedial gymnast,

Marston Green, Birmingham.

Grieve, Duncan G., Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Rotary-press

assistant, Grimsby, Lincolnshire. Griffiths, Frederick F., L/sgt.

[Guards Armoured]. Miner, New

Tupton, Chesterfield. Growe, Michael G., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Inspector of motor

components, Sheldon, Birmingham. Hackett, John, Brigadier

[1/ Airborne].

D.s.o., M.b.e., M.c.,

Retired Commander in Chief, British

Army of the Rhine. Hall, Eric, Sgt. [1/ Airborne].

Sales manager, Schweppes,

London. Hall, J. A., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Clerk, British

Embassy, Louvain, Belgium. Halliwell, Stanley, L/sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Builder, Cheshire. Hands, Lewis, Sgt. [1/ Airborne].

Company director, Nottingham. Hardman, Donald A., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Fireman, Northants. Harker, M., Capt. [Phantom Net].

Director, wine and spirits merchants,

London. Harris, Thomas H., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Grinder, Warwickshire. Harrison, Charles A., Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Stockbroker, London. Harvey, Bernard H., Warrant Off.

[R.a.f.]. D.f.c., Civil

servant, Guildford, Surrey. Harvey-Kelly, C. William, Lt.

[Guards Armoured]. Colonel,

British Army, London. Hatch, Roy Ernest, Sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Motorcycle dealer,

Caterham, Surrey. Hawkings, Angela [Red Cross].

Buyer, New York, N.y. Hay, Neville, Lt. [Phantom

Net]. General manager to a security

organization, London. Haysom, James N., Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Engineer, Cardiff,

Wales. Haywood, Bernard, Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Legal executive,

Cheshire. Haywood, Leslie N., FirstSgt.

[R.a.f.]. Retired police

sergeant, E. Yorkshire. Hendy, Arthur S., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Bus driver, London

Transportation, Kent. Hennon, Wilfred, Warrant Off.

II [1/ Airborne].

C.s.m., Civil servant,

Farnborough, Hampshire. Herman, Jack, Flying Officer

[R.a.f.]. Investment consultant,

London. Hewitt, Jack, Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Assistant head

postmaster, Yorkshire. Heyes, Stanley, Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Sub officer, fire

brigade, Cheshire. Heywood, A. G., Capt. [Guards

Armoured]. C.b.e., M.e.,

Colonel, British Army,

Wiltshire. Hicks, Philip H. W., Brigadier

[1/ Airborne]. Retired Major

General, Hampshire. Hicks, Thomas, Sapper [1/

Airborne]. Locomotive driver,

British Railways, Yorkshire. Hill, Joseph J., W/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Personnel officer,

Staffordshire. Hogan, Patrick, Guardsman

[Guards Armoured]. Postman,

Middlesex. Holburn, A. R., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Lt. Col., Zambia

Army, Lusaka, Zambia. Hollis, Frank, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Oil company driver,

Essex. Hollobone, Bernard, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Shopowner, Leicester. Holloway, John J., Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Engineer, Kennington,

Oxfordshire. Holt, B. R., S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Engineering planning

manager, Leeds 16, Yorkshire. Holt, Ronald C., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Managing director,

flooring contractor, Saltney, Cheshire. Homfray, Frank R., Lt.
[Guards

Armoured]. Farmer, Newbury,

Berkshire. Hopkins, George, Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Joiner,

Tamworth, Staffordshire. Hopkinson, H. S., Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. Colonel, commanding Household

Cavalry, East Hagbourne, Berkshire. Horsefield, James, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Planer, Whickham,

Newcastle-on-Tyne. Hoskins, James, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Police constable,

Manchester.

Houghton, H. R., W/sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Plasterer, Liverpool

7. Houston, Francis Wesley, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Clerk,

Newcastle-upon-Tyne 3. Howson, Victor, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Heat and frost insulator,

London, E. 17. Hudson, Frank, L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Lodgeman,

Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Humphries, Alan Peter, Lt. [1/

Airborne]. Partner in accounting firm,

Esher, Surrey. Hunt, Stanley J., Flight Lt.

[R.a.f.]. Education officer,

R.a.f. Squadron Leader,

Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Hurst, William, W/sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Foreman, nr. Bolton,

Lancashire. Huth, William J., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Manager of jewelry

shop, Morden, Surrey. Inglis, Walter, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Hall porter, St.

Albans, Hertfordshire. Isherwood, Reginald, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Managing director,

Brentwood, Essex. Isitt, Bernard C., Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. Insurance adjuster, Paris,

France. Jeavons, Sidney T., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Machinist, Sheffield,

Yorkshire. Jenkins, Walter, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Nurse,

Derbyshire. Jennings, Robert, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Diesel-plant fitter,

Farnborough, Hampshire. Johnson, Ronald O., Lt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. General manager,

Hoover Co., Wien 19, Austria. Jones, Alfred, Pvt. [Pathfinder, 1/

Airborne]. Civil servant,

British Army, Germany. Jones, A. G. C., Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. Lt. Col., British

Army, London W. 8. Jones, C. P., Lt. Col. [Guards

Armoured]. G.c.b., C.b.e.,

M.c. Retired Army General, Rye,

Sussex. Jones, Eric, Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Paper converter, Widnes,

Lancashire. Jones, James F., L/bombadier [1/

Airborne]. Detective inspector of

police, Witney, Oxfordshire. Jones, James Henry, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Bus driver, Speke,

Liverpool. Jones, Robert H., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Managing director,

Transport and General Contractors,

Kitwe, Zambia. Jones, William, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Electrician,

Dudley, Worcestershire. Jordan, Ronald G., Arm/cfn. [1/

Airborne]. Sales-office manager,

nr. Birmingham. Jukes, G. W., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Telephone installer,

Vancouver, British Columbia. Kane, John P., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Works foreman,

Yorkshire. Keenan, James M., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Engineer, New Parks,

Leicestershire. Kelly, Donald, L/sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Hospital canteen

manager, Bishopton, Renfrewshire. Kent, Ronald, Sgt. [Pathfinder,
1/

Airborne]. Solicitor,

Cape Province, South

Africa. Kibble, William H., Reg. Sgt.

Major [1/ Airborne]. Caretaker,

Twerton, Bath. Killick, J. E., Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Counselor in H. M.

Foreign Service, Washington, D.c. King, Charles D., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Tannery foreman, Little

Borough, Lancashire. King, Frank D., Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Major General,

M.b.e., Whitehall, London,

S.w. 1. King, Henry A., Flying

Officerstationavigator [R.a.f.].

Queen's Messenger Escort, London,

N. 12. King, Leonard, S/sgt. [Glider Pilot

Regt.]. Police sergeant, Barnet,

Hertfordshire. Kitchener, Joseph H., S/sgt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. Postal and

telegraph officer, Lewes, Sussex. Knee, Frank, L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Linotype operator,

Coventry. Langford, Thomas, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Industrial buyer,

Blaydon-on-Tyne, County Durham.

Langton, Roland S., Capt. [Irish

Guards]. M.v.o., M.c.,

Colonel, British Army,

Oxfordshire. Lankstead, William A., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Motor mechanic,

Northwich, Cheshire. Lathbury, Gerald, Brig. [1/

Airborne]. G.c.b., D.s.o.,

M.b.e., Gerald, Sir, Governor

and Commander in Chief of Gibraltar. Lewis, Edward, Cpl. [Guards

Armoured]. Tool setter, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire. Lewis, Richard P. C., Major [1/

Airborne]. Corn merchant, Alton,

Hampshire. Lindley, Francis William,

Major [1/ Airborne].

Sub postmaster, Retford,

Nottinghamshire. Line, Cyril, S/sgt. [Glider Pilot

Regt.]. Surveyor, Wedmore,

Somersetshire. Lister, Eric C., Sgt. [Guards

Armoured]. Fish merchant, Strood,

Kent. Little, Kenneth E., Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Works employee,

Bristol 4. Loney, Patrick A., Trooper [1/

Airborne]. Lorry driver,

London, E. 6. Long, Michael W., Lt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Manager,

Technical Publications,

Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire. Long, Richard C., S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Technical

representative, Romford, Essex. Longland, Cedric James, Major [1/

Airborne]. Surgeon,

Dumbartonshire, Scotland. Lonsdale, Richard, Major

[1/ Airborne]. Private means,

Jersey, Channel Islands. Lord, John C., * Reg. Sgt. Major

[1/ Airborne]. M.v.o.,

M.b.e. Love, Donald, Flight Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. Insurance agency

superintendent, Eastbourne, Sussex. Luckhurst, Frederick A., Sapper
[1/

Airborne]. Aircraft worker, Wooten

Bassett, Wiltshire. Lumb, D., Cpl. [1/ Airborne].

Toolmaker, Rochdale, Lancashire. Lumb, Vernon, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Sales manager,

Rotherham, Sheffield. Mackay, Eric M., Capt. [1/

Airborne]. M.b.e., D.s.c.,

British Army Colonel, The

Maultway, Camerley, Surrey. Mackenzie, Charles B., Lt.col. [1/

Airborne]. Secretary, T. and

A.f.a., Glasgow, Scotland. Mahaffey, Rupert, Lt.

[Guards Armoured]. Bank

director, London S.w. 3. Major, Sidney Francis, L/sgt.

[1/ Airborne]. Sales

representative, Hatfield,

Hertfordshire. Malley, Joe, Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. British Army, Hull,

Yorkshire. Marples, Graham, Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Land investigator,

Penistone, Yorkshire. Mason, Valery E. C., Sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Official, Zambia

government, Ndola, Zambia. Mayne, William Victor, Guardsman

[Guards Armoured]. Lorry driver,

Newtonabbey, County Antrim, Northern

Ireland. McBain, Ronald C., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Fish merchant,

Whitehaven, Cumberland. McCardie, W. D. H., Lt. Col.

[1/ Airborne]. Company

director, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. McClory, Owen D., Pvt.

[1/ Airborne]. Records clerk,

Billingham-on-Tees County Durham. McGuinness, Hugh, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Docker, Whitehaven,

Cumberland. McMahon, Thomas, Pvt. [Pathfinder,

1/ Airborne]. Turf accountant,

Twickenham, Middlesex. Mcationeill, David W., S/sgt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. Company

director, Stirlingshire, Scotland. Milbourne, Andrew, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Civil servant,

Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Miller, Claire [Civilian].

M.b.e., B.e.m. Company

director, Rickmansworth,

Hertfordshire.

Miller, Victor D., S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Technical

representative, Walingham, Surrey. Mills, John C., Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Auto

association patrol, Scarborough,

Yorkshire. Mitchell, Edward, Sgt. [Glider Pilot

Regt.]. Maintenance dept., Ford

Motor Co., Liverpool 19. Mitchell, Gordon L., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Process engineer,

Heanor, Nottinghamshire. Moberly, Richard J., Col. [1/

Airborne]. Retired Major

General, British Army, Salisbury,

Wiltshire. Mole, Joseph D., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Plasterer, Stepney,

London, E. 1. Moncur, Francis W., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Educational adviser,

publishing firm, Wellington, New

Zealand. Montgomery, Hector, Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Sales manager, Woking,

Surrey. Moore, Rodney, Lt. Col. [Guards

Armoured]. G.c.v.g., K.c.r.,

C.b.e., D.s.o., Gen. Sir.

(retired), Ascot,

Berkshire. Moorwood, S. James D., Lt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.].

Solicitor, Shamley Green,

Surrey. Morgans, Daniel T., Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Storeman, Rhon.a,

Glamorganshire, Wales. Morris, Dave, R.q.m.s. [1/

Airborne]. Security officer,

Luton, Bedfordshire. Munford, Dennis, Major [1/

Airborne]. Retired Colonial

Service official, Southwold, Suffolk. Murray, lain, Lt. Col.
[Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Retired, London. Nattrass, George, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Hotel manager, nr.

Middlesbrough, Yorkshire. Nayler, Anthony E., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Lorry driver, Melton

Mowbray, Leicestershire. Newbury, Edwin, Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Chief officer of

Licensing Dept., London. Noble, Jeffrey F., Lt. [1/

Airborne]. Personnel director,

Sussex. Nunn, Sydney R. G., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Photographer,

Stevenage, Hertfordshire. Oakes, William, Sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Civil servant,

High Barnet, Hertfordshire. O'Brien, William A., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Salesman, Waltham

Cross, Hertfordshire. O'Leary, Peter, L/sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Sales-office manager,

Goffs Oak, Hertfordshire. Overton, Leonard M., Sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Police inspector,

West Derby, Liverpool. Pare, G. A., Chaplain [Glider Pilot

Regt.]. Vicar, St. James Church,

Warrington, Lancashire. Paris, Edward P., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Painter, decorator,

Blackheath. Parkes, Percy, L/bombardier

[1/ Airborne]. Police

superintendent, Derbyshire. Partridge, Felix F., Sapper [1/

Airborne]. Carpenter, Sudbury,

Suffolk. Paterson, William, Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Managing director,

Southport, Lancashire. Pavey, Charles, Gunner [1/

Airborne]. Painter and decorator,

Crawley, Sussex. Pawsey, Jack, L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Printer, London. Pearce, Kenneth J., Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Head of Science Dept.,

Longford School, Twickenham,

Middlesex. Pearce, Thomas W., Sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Driver, delivery

man, Croydon, Surrey. Pearson, Dudley R., S/sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Auctioneer and estate

agent, Weston Favel, Northampton. Peatling, Robert, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Compositor,

London.

Phillips, Bernard, L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Sales manager,

Manchester. Phillips, Edward L., C.f. [1/

Airborne]. Vicar, Lewes,

Sussex. Potter, George H., Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Decorating contractor,

Wednesfield, Staffordshire. Powell, George S., Major [1/

Airborne]. Civil servant,

London. Preston, Henry G. C., Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Works employee,

Syston, Leicestershire. Pritchard, Thomas, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Prison officer,

Edinburgh, Scotland. Prosser, John E., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Security officer,

Reading, Berkshire. Pyne, Gordon, Sgt. [Glider Pilot

Regt.]. Company

secretarystaccountant, Clophill,

Bedfordshire. Quinan, B. P., Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. Oil company official,

Baghdad, Iraq. Ralph, Edward E. S., S/sgt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.] Planning

engineer, Eastleigh, Hampshire. Rate, John, Sgt. [1/ Airborne].

Coach driverstcourier, Wigston

Fields, Leicester. Rathband, Harry, Sgt. [Glider Pilot

Regt.]. Oil company service engineer,

Oxford. Read, Victor H., Signalman [1/

Airborne]. Electrical contractor,

Basingstoke, Hampshire. Reynolds, Alfred S., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Works foreman, nr.

Dartford, Kent. Richards, John T., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Representative,

Wilford, Nottinghamshire. Rigby-Jones, Guy, Major

[1/ Airborne]. M.c.,

T.d., Orthopedic surgeon,

London. Robb, Richard, L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Lecturer in surveying,

Nottingham. Robinson, Peter T., Sgt. [Guards

Armoured]. Excavator driver,

Southend, Essex. Robinson, Wilfred H., Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Schoolmaster, Kenilworth

Cape, South Africa. Rose, John William, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Postman, South Harrow,

Middlesex. Roullier, Alfred W., W/bombardier

[1/ Airborne]. Restaurant

manager, Egham, Surrey. Russell, Cyril, Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. Solicitor, London. St. Aubyn, Piers, Lt. [1/

Airborne]. M.c., Stockbroker,

Ringmer, Sussex. Salt, Wilfred D., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Postman, Willenhall,

Staffordshire. Savage, Gordon, Gunner [1/

Airborne]. Bus driver,

Arrowthwaite, Whitehaven, Cumberland. Schofield, Allan, Warrant Off.

[R.a.f.]. Nurse, Dawlish,

Devonshire. Scott-Barrett, David, Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. M.b.e., M.c.,

Colonel, British Army, British

Forces Post Office 15. Seaford, Raymond G., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Executive director,

Luton, Bedfordshire. Seccombe, Ernest, Capt. [1/

Airborne]. Senior tutor,

Hospital Administrative Staff

College, London. Seeckts, James, Co. Sgt. Major

[1/ Airborne]. Machine operator,

Skelmersdole, Lancashire. Shackelton, Ralph, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Wool broker, Shipley,

Yorkshire. Shearwood, Arthur, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Docker,

London. Sheath, Alfred H., S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Fishmonger, Kent. Sheriff, Gordon, Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Telephonist,

Gloucester. Short, Edward R., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Government housing

employee, Westoning, Bedfordshire. Simpson, Walter T., Sgt.

[R.a.f.]. Engineering inspector,

Cheylesmore, Coventry. Sims, James W., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Radio clerk, Brighton

6, Sussex. Small, Albert E., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Vehicle mechanic,

Normanton, Yorkshire. Smart, Roy J., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Racehorse trainer,

Johannesburg, South Africa. Smith, Arthur J., Sgt. [Guards

Armoured]. Charge Hand, Birmingham

31. Smith, Eric, Guardsman

[Guards Armoured]. Police officer,

Coventry.

Smith, Frederick J., Guardsman

[Guards Armoured]. Detective

inspector, Bradford 2, Yorkshire. Smith, Frederick P., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Casualty orderly,

London. Smith, Henry, Lt. Col. [Guards

Armoured]. K.c.m.g.,

K.c.v.o., D.s.o., Retired,

Windsor, Berkshire. Smith, John S., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Communications engineer,

Wolverhampton, Staffordshire. Smith, Thomas, Guardsman [Guards

Armoured]. Building foreman,

Coventry. Southall, William J., Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Recreational supervisor,

Coventry. Spelman, Dennis G., S/sgt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.].

Sales manager, Bromley,

Kent. Spencer, Harold W., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Baker, Grimsby,

Lincolnshire. Spicer, Gordon F., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Machine-tool worker,

Portslade, Sussex. Spivey, Horace, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Textile executive,

Dewsbury, Yorkshire. Stainforth, Peter, Lt. [1/ Airborne].

Chemical engineer, Knebworth,

Hertfordshire. Standish, Harold, C/sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Sgt. Major in

S.a.s. Regt., Salisbury, Southern

Rhodesia. Stanley-Clarke, J. Q., Capt.

[Guards Armoured]. Draper's

assistant, Shepton-Mallet,

Somerset. Stanners, Geoffrey, Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Company director, Great

Kingshill, nr. Wycombe,

Buckinghamshire. Steele, Robert R., Capt. [Guards

Armoured]. M.b.e., Company

director, Beaulieu, Hampshire. Stewart, Richard, Major [1/

Airborne]. M.c., Solicitor,

Scotby, Carlisle. Storey, Charles, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Captain, Quartermaster,

British Army, Bahrein Garrison,

B.f.p.o. 63. Stretton, Arthur H., Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Stamford jointer,

Tamworth, Staffordshire. Sturges, Sidney A., Cpl. [1/

Airborne]. TV representative,

Erdington, Birmingham. Sullivan, Thomas Stanley, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Managing director,

Stockport, Derbyshire. Sunley, Ralph ("Joe"), Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Head gardener, Farnham,

Surrey. Swift, Norman, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Police

sergeant, Maidstone, Kent. Swinfield, William A., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Butcher,

Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Taylor, Arthur Reginald, Sgt.

[Guards Armoured]. M.m., Police

inspector, Ipswich, Suffolk. Taylor, George, Lt. Col. [43rd

Wessex]. C.b.e., D.s.o.,

Brigadier (retired), British Army,

Tilford, Surrey. Taylor, will. A., T/capt. [1/

Airborne]. Lt. Col., British

Army, Bournemouth, Hampshire. Tedman, Francis R., Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. D.s.m., M.m.,

Panel beater, Tadworth, Surrey. Thomas, D., Cpl. [1/ Airborne].

Foreman, TV cabinet firm,

Croydon, Surrey. Thomas, Sir G. Ivor, Maj. Gen.

[43rd Wessex]. G.c.b.,

K.b.e., D.s.o., M.c.,

General (retired), British Army,

Salisbury, Rhodesia. Thomas, Thomas, C.q.m.s.

[1/ Airborne]. M.b.e.,

Major, British Army, Deringlines,

Brecon, Wales. Thompson, William F. K., Lt. Col.

[1/ Airborne]. Brigadier

(retired), British Army; military

editor, Daily Telegraph, London. Thompson, William Peter, Sgt.
Pilot

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. Company

director, Gateshead, County Durham. Thorley, John Henry, Signalman
[1/

Airborne]. Businessman,

Barnstaple, Devonshire.

Tilly, Gerald, Lt. Col. [XXX

Corps]. D.s.o., T.d., Board

chairman, Coulsdon, Surrey. Tims, Eric Lawson, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Constable, Eccles,

Lancashire. Toler, Thomas Ian Jodrell, Major

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. General

manager, chemical company, Alvanley,

Cheshire. Tomblin, Bryan Alan, Sgt.

Plt. [Glider Pilot Regt.].

Police superintendent, Duston,

Northamptonshire. Tomlin, Edw. Geo., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. B.e.m., Security

officer, Acton, London, W. 3. Tompson, William Claude, FirstSgt.

[R.a.f.]. Shopkeeper, London. Travis-Davison, Kenneth, Sgt. Plt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. Company

director, Leeds. Turnau, Godfrey Joseph, FirstLt.

[R.a.f.]. D.f.c., M.s.c.,

Civil servant, Salisbury,

Rhodesia. Turner, Arthur J. B., L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Chauffeur, Oxford. Turner, Desmond N. S., Lt.

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. Probation

officer, nr. Bury, Lancashire. Turner, John, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Social-security

administrator, Coventry. Tyler, E. G., Major [Guards

Armoured]. M.c., Bar,

Company director, Wooburn Green,

Buckinghamshire. Udal, E. R., Capt. [Guards

Armoured]. Legal adviser, banking

group, Hong Kong. Umpleby, Kenneth, Guardsman [Guards

Armoured]. Textile foreman,

Keighley, Yorkshire. Urquhart, Brian, Major [1/

Airborne]. United Nations, New

York. Urquhart, Robert Elliott (roy),

Maj. Gen. [1/ Airborne].

C.b., D.s.o., Company

director, Glasgow, Scotland. Vandeleur, Giles A. M., Lt. Col.

[Guards Armoured]. D.s.o.,

Privately employed, London. Vandeleur, J. O. E., Lt. Col.

[Guards Armoured]. Brigadier

(retired), British Army, Maidenhead,

Berkshire. Van Zoelen, F. W. E. Groeninx, 1/

Lt. [Guards Armoured].

Investment consultant, Madrid,

Spain. Vincent, Raymond, L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Aeronautical worker,

Little Stoke, Bristol. Vlasto, Robert A., Lt. [1/

Airborne]. Stockbroker,

Worplesdon, Surrey. Waddy, John L., Major [1/

Airborne]. O.b.e., Colonel,

British Army, Chelsea. Walch, A. G., Brig. Gen. [1/

Airborne]. O.b.e., Brigadier

(retired), British Army, Marlborough,

Wiltshire. Walchli, Robin O., Capt.

[R.a.f.]. Chartered quantity

surveyor, Sarratt, Hertfordshire. Walton, James, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Clerk, Bootle,

Lancashire. Ward, George William, L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Postman, Reading,

Berkshire. Ware, Denis J., S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Headmaster,

Huntingfield School, Mitcham,

Surrey. Warnock, Geoffrey James, Lt.

[Guards Armoured]. Fellow of

Magdalen College; tutor in

philosophy, Oxford. Warrack, Graeme, Col. [1/

Airborne]. Dentist, Edinburgh,

Scotland. Warrender, Alfred George, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Polishing ship inspector,

Wolverhampton, Staffordshire. Watson, Arthur A., Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Printer, London. Watson, Arthur E., L/cpl. [Guards

Armoured]. Lorry driver, Sussex. Weallens, Arthur Edward, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Post-office employee,

Northumberland. Wellard, Leonard Edward, Sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Bank manager,

London.

Wells, William James,

S/sgt. [Glider Pilot Regt.].

Administrator, London Electrical

Board, London. Welsby, Cyril, Pvt. [Guards

Armoured]. Glazier, Manchester. Westbury, James Ernest, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Postman, Nottingham. Wheeler, Jack, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Retail grocer,

Warwick. White, George, W.o.i. [1/

Airborne]. Verger and parish clerk,

Bridlington, Yorkshire. Whitehead, James, S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Relay adjuster,

Warwick. Wickham, John Thomas, Sapper [1/

Airborne]. Clerk, Leicester. Wi.owson, G., Major [1/

Airborne]. C.b.e., T.d.,

Colonel (retired), British Army;

bank manager, Birmingham. Wilcox, Geoffrey, Sgt. [Guards

Armoured]. D.c.m., Works manager,

Berkshire. Wilcox, Ivor, Sgt. [Guards

Armoured]. Welder, Bedfordshire. Williams, Cyril, Sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. Headmaster, School

for Handicapped, Bristol. Williams, Gwyn, Sgt. [1/

Airborne]. Innkeeper, Cheshire. Williams, John James, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Steelworks mason,

Tredegar, Monmouthshire. Willoughby, Michael, Capt. [Guards

Armoured]. Landowner, Yorkshire. Wilson, Norman Edward, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Works employee,

Staffordshire. Winterbottom, Lord Ian, 2nd Lt.

[Guards Armoured]. Parliamentary

secretary, Public Buildings and Works

Ministry, Northamptonshire. Wood, Jack, Pvt. [1/ Airborne].

Laboratory assistant, Staffordshire. Wordsworth, Ferrers Robin, Lt.
[Guards

Armoured]. Company secretary,

Welwyn, Hertfordshire. Wright, Harry, Pvt. [1/

Airborne]. Structural-design

draftsman, Transvaal, South

Africa. Wright, Leonard, S/sgt. [Glider

Pilot Regt.]. D.f.m.,

Schoolteacher, Whitehaven, Cumberland. Wright, William Charles, Sgt.
Pilot

[Glider Pilot Regt.]. Sales

representative, Bristol. Wrottesley, Lord Richard John, Capt.

[Guards Armoured]. Private means,

Salisbury, Rhodesia. Wyllie, George, L/cpl. [1/

Airborne]. Greengrocer,

Warwickshire. Yerburgh, J. M. A., Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. Company director,

Kirkcudbrightshire. York, Harold, L/sgt. [Guards

Armoured]. M.m., Postman,

London. Young, Arthur Vincent, Lt. [Guards

Armoured]. M.c., Company director,

nr. Stourbridge, Worcestershire.

DUTCH Bernhard, The Prince of the Netherlands. Aa, Rudolph van der
[Ede].

Photographer, Ede. Aeyelts, Lauren Daniel [Helmond].

Staff employee, Royal Zwanenburg

factories, Oss. Agt, Antonius L.g.m. van

[Gemert, Eindhoven]. Archivist,

Eindhoven. Aken, Pieter van [Wolfheze].

Dermatologist, Ede. Alsche-deKat, Hermina Jacoba

[Elst]. Housewife, Elst. Andriesse, Maurits [Dinther].

Retired, Veghel. Ari@ens, Theodorus Antonius

[Arnhem]. Retired cleric,

Arnhem. Aspert-Doornakkers, Anna Maria van

[Zeelst]. Housewife, Zeelst. Assendelft, Leendert van [Huissen].

Chemical engineer, Arnhem. Baak, Norbertus H. J.

[Son]. State policeman,

St. Oedenrode.

Backus, Johannes H.h.e.

[Arnhem]. Personnel manager,

Nijmegen. Baltussen, Arnoldus J. A.

[Driel]. Burgomaster, Groesbeek. Baltussen, Cora [Driel]. Teacher,

Driel. Baltussen, Josephus Frans

[Driel]. Company director,

Driel. Bartels, Willem F. H. [Nijmegen].

Public prosecutor, St.

Odilienberg. Barten, Johannes A. [Grave].

Tailor, Grave. Bech, Niels [Wolfheze]. Works

inspector, Oss. Beek, Dirk van [Oosterbeek].

Bakery salesman, Oosterbeek. Beek, Marius van der [Wolfheze].

Psychiatrist, Bergen op Zoom. Beekmeyer, Adriaan J. P., Cpl.

[British 1/ Airborne,

England/arnhem].

Veterinary-pharmaceutical firm

employee, Amsterdam. Beermann, Victor Antonius M.

[Nijmegen]. U.n.

Representative, Australia. Bemen, Bob W. van [Lent].

Construction mason, Miami, Fla.,

U.s.a. Bergh-Braam, Anna H. M. van den

[Gent]. Housewife, Nijmegen. Bergh, Johannes G. van den, Commando

[U.s. 82nd Airborne, England].

Director, Students Housing Foundation,

's Hertogenbosch. Bernebeek, Franciscus J. H. van

[Groesbeek]. Printer,

Groesbeek. Beyerbergen van Heneqouwen, Augustinus N.

G. [Oosterbeek]. Teacher,

Amersfoort. Bijlsma-Lusschen, Maria [Oosterbeek].

Oosterbeek. Bisterbosch, Heimrich

[Arnhem]. Alderman,

Arnhem. Bitters, Jacob Johan [Nijmegen].

Mechanic, Nijmegen. Bitters, Janna [Nijmegen].

Housewife, Nijmegen. Blaauw-Baghuis, Fie [Eindhoven].

Housewife, Arnhem. Blokland, Jan Jacob G. B. van

Brig. Major [Princess Irene

Brigade]. Colonel (retired),

Dutch Cavalry, Oosterbeek. Bode, Nicolaas T. de [Arnhem].

Supervisor, Netherlands Radio

Union, Hilversum. Boekraad-Otto, Maria O.

[Nijmegen]. Housewife, Nijmegen. Bolderman, Cornelis [Arnhem].

Sgt. Major, Netherlands Defense

Forces, Arnhem. Bolle-deWijk, Jutta [Renkum].

Housewife, Munich. Bossert, Gijsbert [Veghel].

Translator and bank official,

Amsterdam. Boyens, Jan Peter

[Eindhoven]. Teacher, Eindhoven. Brachten, Everardus [Driel].
Retired,

Driel. Bremen, Bertha [Oosterbeek].

Housewife, Oosterbeek. Brevet, William Karel [Arnhem].

Radiologist, Arnhem. Broekkamp, Elias Henricus

[Nijmegen]. Wine importer,

Nijmegen. Brom, Johannes Hendricus

[Valkenswaard]. Caretaker, Town

Hall, Valkenswaard. Brouwer, Jacobus G. [Nijmegen].

Major, Royal Land Forces,

Deventer. Brouwer, Jacobus, G. L.

[Oosterbeek]. Retired, The

Hague. Brummelkamp-van Maanen, Anje

[Oosterbeek]. Housewife,

Middelburg. Bruschetto, Peter John [Nijmegen].

Security police officer,

Ontario, Canada. Busch, Johannus J. T. [Driel].

Hotel manager, Driel. B@yen-van de Weerd, Jennie

[Bennekom]. Housewife, Richmond,

Calif., U.s.a. Claassen, A. [Bladel]. Teacher,

Waalwijk. Clous-Veen, Ida Egbertina

[Oosterbeek]. Housewife,

Oosterbeek. Companjen, Albert G. [Berg en Dal].

Bookkeeper, Groesbeek. Coninx, Guillaume [Lommel,

Belgium]. Superintendent of

Police, Lommel, Belgium. Deinum, Martijn Louis [Nijmegen].

Director, Orpheus Theater,

Apeldoorn. Derksen, Antoon [Arnhem]. Retired,

Arnhem. Derksen, Theodorus F. R. [Nijmegen].

Headwaiter, Amsterdam. Deure, Jacob van der [Bennekom].

Attorney, Ede. Deuss, Albertus J. P.

[Arnhem]. Liaison officer,

A.k.u. (international), Arnhem. Dijk, Sister Christine M. van

[Arnhem]. Retired, Arnhem.

Dijk, Frans van [Waalre]. Company

director, Waalre. Dijker, Reinold F. [Oosterbeek].

Catholic priest, Sintang Kalbar,

Indonesia. Does, Jacob van der [Arnhem].

Retired surgeon, Arnhem. Donderwinkel, Jan Willem

[Oosterbeek]. Retired, Oosterbeek. Doorne, Herman van [Wolfheze].

Retired, Wolfheze. Driessen, Jan, interpreter [30th

Infantry Div.]. Factory

director, Veghel. Drost, Johannes C. [Arnhem].

Physician, Arnhem. Edwards, Eric Stuart [Eindhoven].

Painter, Eindhoven. Eerd, Johannes W. A. van

[Veghel]. Photographer,

Veghel. Eijkelhoff, Jan Adriaan

[Oosterbeek]. Bank clerk,

Oosterbeek. Eijnden, Lambertus H. van der

[Eindhoven]. Wage administrator,

N. V. Philips, Eindhoven. Einthoven, Louis [Utrecht]. Archivist,

Lunteren. Elst, Evert Jan van den [Nijmegen].

Retired, Nijmegen. Fabius, Kaeso [Doetinchem].

Burgomaster, Bilthoven. Feenstra, Robijn [Kesteren]. Fruit

grower, Kesteren. Fischer, Wiihelmus Antonius [Berg en

Dal]. Company director,

Bloemendaal. Fleskens, Leonardus Johannes J.

[Aalst]. Bank director,

Geldrop. Gall-van der Heijden, Ida [Acht].

Housewife, Eindhoven. Gelderblom, Jan [Oosterbeek]. Head

surveyor, Oosterbeek Gas

Works, Oosterbeek. Gent, Jacob van [Nijmegen]. Company

director, Amsterdam. Giebing-van Kolfschoten, Geertruida W.

[Oosterbeek]. Housewife,

Heelsum. Giebing, Willem H. [Oosterbeek].

Caf`e owner, Doorwerth. Gier, Dr. Johannes de [Eindhoven].

Retired physicist, Eindhoven. Goossens, Adrianus [Bladel].

Teacher at University, Bladel, Den

Bosch. Goyaerts, Marinus Petrus J.

[Veghel]. Contractor firm

employee, Rosmalen. Graaf, Kas de, Maj. [Netherlands

Forces]. Managing director, Netherland

Shipping Council, Den Haag. Graaff, Pieter de [Arnhem].

Surgeon, Arnhem. Gras, Jan Dirk [Princess Irene

Brigade, Belgium]. Captain,

Artillery, Breda. Groot, Johannes A. de

[Uden]. Farmer, Uden. Groot, Johannes T. de [Uden].

Retired, Rotterdam. Gysbers, Gerhardus Wilhelmus

[Arnhem]. Rare-book dealer,

Arnhem. Haas, Henri Leonard de [Arnhem].

Oculist, Arnhem. Hagens, Herman G. [Wageningen].

Telephone company empoyee, Arnhem. Hak, Henri Johan [Arnhem].

Retired minister, Dutch Reformed Church,

Arnhem. Ham, Gijsbertus J. [Arnhem].

Arnhem. Hapert-Lathouwers, Johanna Theodora M.

van [Eindhoven]. Housewife,

Eindhoven. Harmsen-Gerritsen, Agnita G. M.

[Ellecom]. Housewife, Ellecom. Harmsen, Gerrit-Jan [Ellecom].

Company director, Ellecom. Have, Frans van der [Wageningen]. School

headmaster, Wageningen. Heckman, Jacohus A.

[Rotterdam]. Medical doctor,

Hilversum. Heestermans-Hendriks, Cornelia

[Bergeijk]. Housewife,

Valkenswaard. Heijden, Jan van der [Netersel].

Agricultural worker, Netersel. Heijden, Johannes A. van der, Sgt.

[Netherlands Jendarmerie, Lent].

Retired, Lent. Heijden-Otto, Magtilda J. M. van

der [Nijmegen]. Housewife,

Nijmegen. Hendriks, Paulus Hendricus

[Nijmegen]. Director-owner

ironworks, Nijmegen. Henneman, Dr. Adrianus J.

[Groesbeek]. Retired medical

doctor, Groesbeek. Henriette, Sister [Schijndel].

Principal, St. Lidwina Hospital,

Schijndel. Herbrink, Antonius M., 1/ Lt.

[Princess Irene Brigade].

Colonel, Dutch Army,

Eindhoven. Hezemans, Johannes W. [Aalst].

Broker, Aalst. Hi.ink, Dirk Jan F. [Arnhem].

Photo-typist, Arnhem.

Hielkema, Hielkem Johannus F.,

Sgt. [Princess Irene Brigade].

Captain, Royal Army, The Hague. Hoefnagels, Hendrik W. [Arnhem].

Medical doctor, Arnhem. Hoek, Herman Lodewijk M.

[Groesbeek]. Retired Roman

Catholic priest, Groesbeek. Hoefsloot, Piet [Arnhem].

Furniture-store owner, Arnhem. Hoof, Maria Cornelia van

[Hoogeloon]. Teacher, Hoogeloon. Hooff, Antoon Jacques J. M. van

[Arnhem]. Director of Zoo,

Arnhem. Hooff, Johannes Antonius R.a.m.

van [Arnhem]. Scientific

official, Utrecht State University,

Bilthoven. Hooff, Johannes G. J. van

[Veghel]. Executive chef,

Yonkers, N.y., U.s.a. Horst, Jan ter [Oosterbeek]. Lawyer,

Oosterbeek. Horst, Kate ter [Oosterbeek].

Housewife, Oosterbeek. Horstman, Albert Jan Carolinus

[Arnhem]. Architect, Amsterdam. Houtsma, Johannus H. [Achterhoek].

Tax adviser, Haarlem. Hudd-van Bork, Hendrika

[Heelsum]. Velp. Huisson, Abraham [Arnhem].

Captain (retired), Royal Army,

Utrecht. Hulleman, Coenraad [Arnhem].

Bank director, Rotterdam. Hulsen, Johannes M. [St.

Oedenrode]. Bricklayer, St.

Oedenrode. Hurkx, Joannes Aloisius [St.

Oedenrode]. Retired, St.

Oedenrode. Hustinx, Charles [Beek en

Donk]. Retired, former Mayor of

Nijmegen, Nijmegen. Huygen, Frans Josef Aloisius

[Lent]. Medical doctor, Lent. Italisander, Arie M. T., Cpl.

[British 1/ Airborne]. Engineer,

Bilthoven. Jans, Leonard [Venlo]. Provincial

commander, civil defense, Bunde. Jansen, Benjamin [Driel]. Florist,

Driel. Jonkers-Krimpenfort, Therese [Arnhem].

Housewife, Eindhoven. Jonkers, Gerardus [Eindhoven]. Office

clerk, Eindhoven. Kaathoven, Franciscus van [St.

Oedenrode]. Retired, St.

Oedenrode. Karel, Hendrik [Arnhem]. Streetcar

driver, Arnhem. Kelderman, Aart C. [Wolfheze].

Mechanic, Wolfheze. Kerssemakers-Asselbergs, Johanna P.

M. [Veghel]. Housewife, Vught. Kersten, Jan Henri J. ['s

Hertogenbosch]. Foundation director,

Naardan. Kip, Louis F. C. van Erp Taalman

[Arnhem]. Neurologist, Arnhem. Kippersluijs, Johan [Groesbeek].

Medical doctor, Groesbeek. Kirchner, Gerardina Alexandrina [Arnhem].

Bookseller, Arnhem. Knap, Henri A. A. R. [Arnhem].

Newspaper columnist, Amsteveleen. Knopper-van Dijk, Maria Anna E.

[Eindhoven]. Housewife, Eindhoven. Knottenbelt, Maarten Jan
[Arnhem].

Writer, Australia. Knuvelder, Gerardus [Eindhoven].

College president, Eindhoven. Kooijk, Johannes van [Eindhoven].

Merchant, Eindhoven. Kooten, Bartholomeus J. C. van

[Heerlen]. Company director,

Bussum. Kortie, Frans [Eindhoven].

Municipal Information Dept.,

Eindhoven. Kraats, Wouter van de

[Oosterbeek]. Radio-TV shop

owner, Oosterbeek. Krap, Charles Douw van der

[Oosterbeek]. Captain (retired),

Dutch Navy, The Hague. Kuijk, Joannes van [Arnhem].

Squadron Sgt. Major, Govt.

Police Staff Territorial Inspection,

Arnhem, Velpe. Kuijpers, Theodorus Albertus

[Veghel]. Parish priest, Vught. Kuyper, Anthonius [Veghel]. Cycle

dealer, Veghel. Labouch@ere, Charles B.

[Velp-Arnhem]. Retired,

Wassenaar. Lamberts, Jeanne W. P. C.

[Arnhem]. Arnhem. Lamers, Gerardus Johannes [Gennep].

Archivist, Veldhoven. Laterveer, Anton Marie [Arnhem].

Medical doctor, anesthesiologist,

Arnhem. Lathouwers, Allegonda L. J.

[Eindhoven]. Teacher,

nurse, Enshede.

Ledoux, Lambert [Heelsum]. Instrument

engineer, South Africa. Leegsma, Agardus Marinus [Nijmegen].

Bookkeeper, Arnhem. Leemans, Johannus A. J. [Lith].

Dentist, Heesch. Leeuwen, Johannes C. van

[Eindhoven]. Company director,

Sassenheim. Legius, Gerardus Laurentius

[Eindhoven]. Town Hall clerk,

Eindhoven. Lenssen, Jan [Son]. Miller, Son

en Breugel. Los, Cornelis Bastiaan [Aalst].

Engineer, Aalst. Luijben, Thomas Arnold J.

[Oosteind]. Municipal Tax

Collector, Groesbeek. Luiten, Cornelis Hendrikus

[Eindhoven]. Company director,

Nijmegen. Maanen, Hanno Paul van

[Oosterbeek]. Medical doctor,

Heinkenszand. Maat, Franciscus van der [St.

Oedenrode]. Factory worker, St.

Michielsgestel. Maria Veronica, Sister (schijndel].

Mother Superior, Schijndel. Marinus, Adrianus L. [Eerde].

Asst. company director, Middlebeers. Marinus, Albertus A. J.
[Eerde].

Blacksmith, Veghel. Martens, Antonius Hendrik

[Nijmegen]. Retired, Nijmegen. Mason-Bremen, Johanna Dina

[Nijmegen]. Housewife,

Fayetteville, N.c., U.s.a. Mast, Willem van der [Groningen].

Medical doctor, Haren. Meddens, Joseph Ignatius M.

[Nijmegen]. Town Clerk,

Nijmegen. Meer, Frits Gerben Louis van der

[Lent]. Roman Catholic priest;

college professor, Lent. Memelink, Garrit [Arnhem].

Chief Inspector, Royal Netherlands

Heath Society, Arnhem. Meyjes, Lucretia [Velp]. Velp. Mijnhart, Jan
[Arnhem].

Mortician, Oosterbeek. Minderhoud, Christiaan [Arnhem].

Central Library chief, Eindhoven. Montfroy, Harry [Arnhem]. Member,

Arnhem City Council, Arnhem. Mortanges, Charles Ferdinand P. de, Lt.

Col. [Princess Irene Brigade,

Grave]. General (retired),

Netherlands Defense Forces, Scheveningen. Muselaars, Joop
[Eindhoven].

Insurance company employee, 's

Hertogenbosch. Nefkins, Petrus Antonius [Grave].

Retired, Grave. Niesen-Otto, Elisabeth J. M.

[Nijmegen]. Housewife,

Maastricht. Nijhoff-van der Meer, Dieuwke [Ede].

Housewife, Ede. Nijhoff, Gerrit Jan [Ede].

Labor cooperator, Ede. Nijholt, Gerrit [Oosterbeek].

Painter, Oosterbeek. Nooy, Menno Antonie de [Ede].

Paint manufacturer, Ede. Nooy, Cornelia de [Ede]. Retired,

Ede. Nooy, Willemina de * [Ede].

Housewife, Ede. Noordermeer, Tiburtius Carolus

[Oss]. Rector, Oyen, N.b. Numan, Gijsbert Jan [Arnhem].

Burgomaster, Harderwijk. Olivier, Agathes Willem [Eindhoven].

Official (retired), Netherlands

Railways, Groenekan. Ommen, Gerrit Hendrik van [Delden].

Warehouseman, Delden. Onck, Willem [Arnhem]. Plumber,

Arnhem. Onstein, Maria Josef F. L. van

Grotenhuis van [Grosebeek].

Retired, Nijmegen. Oorschot, Matheas C. van

[Schijndel]. Mineworker, Brunssum. Osterom-Janssen, Johanna C.

van [Nijmegen]. Housewife,

Nijmegen. Otten, Antoinette [Erp]. School

principal, Erp. Otten, Gerardus [Erp]. Soest. Otten, Harry [Erp].
Erp. Oteen, Theodore [Erp]. Heesch. Ouweneel-Coppens, Wilhelmina
Bartholomea

C. [St. Oedenrode]. Housewife,

Eindhoven. Oxener, Cornelis Gerard [Oosterbeek].

P.t.t. official, Terborg. Passier, Johannes M. [Son].

Retired teacher, Son.

Peassens, Anne, Maj. [Princess

Irene Brigade]. Ministry of Foreign

Affairs, The Hague. Peelen, Jan [Renkum]. Chief of

expedition, Krommenie. Peijnenburg, Henri Joan M.

[Nijmegen]. State Secretary of

Defense, Royal Army, Wassenaar. Pennings, Jan [Renkum].

Farmer, Renkum. Penseel, Johannes [Arnhem].

Retired, Arnhem. Peterse, Wilhelmus Jozephus

[Nijmegen]. Curate, Rossum. Pieper, Jan Willem [Dodewaart].

Headmaster, boarding school, Harderwijk. Pit, Hugo Frans
[Oosterbeek].

Engineer, Sterksel. Pol, Hendrikus van de

[Ede-Bennekom]. Deputy director

of company, Ede. Pol, Leonardus Johannes van de

[Son]. Retired medical doctor,

Enschede. Ponsioen, Jacobus [Nijmegen].

Hospital director, Winschoten. Post, Hendrikus Jacobus [Arnhem].

Station chief, central station, Rotterdam. Post, Tjerk, Lt. [Princess
Irene

Brigade]. Lt. Col. (retired),

Royal Army, Diepenveen. Postulart, Johan Wilhelmus

[Nijmegen]. Garage owner,

Nijmegen. Posthuma, Jan Pieter [The

Hague]. Director, telephone

company, Leeuwarden. Praag, Simon van [Nijmegen].

Retired, Nijmegen. Presser, Samuel [Arnhem].

Photographer, Amsterdam. Putten, Theo van der * [Eindhoven].

Municipal official, Eindhoven. Ravensbergen, Johannes [Arnhem].

Retired, Bennekom. Remmerde, Dirk [Ittersum].

P.t.t., Rijswijk. Reneman, Nico [Arnhem]. Oosterbeek. Rietveld, Jan
[Ede]. Surveyor,

Bennebroek. Ridder, Tony de [Oosterbeek].

Housewife, Oosterbeek. Ringelenstein-van Stuyvenberg, Cornelia

Elisabeth van [Arnhem]. Tiel. Roefs, Martinus [Son en Breugel].

Retired official, Son. Roelofs, Theodorus [Overasselt].

Office manager, Eindhoven. Rooijens, Cornelis Joannes

[Nijmegen]. Municipal

health clerk, Nijmegen. Roosendall, Rudolf Bartholomeus E.

[Randwijk]. Psychologist, Arnhem. Rooy, Petrus H. van [St.

Oedenrode]. School principal, St.

Oedenrode. Sabel, Henricus H. G. [Eindhoven].

School clerk, Eindhoven. Sanden, Johannes van der [Veghel].

Veghel. Sanders, Petrus Antonius M.

[Ledeacker]. Civil servant,

Eindhoven. Schaap, Lambert [Arnhem]. Retired,

Arnhem. Schalm, Leendert [Arnhem]. Medical

doctor, Arnhem. Schermer, Arjen [Arnhem]. Retired,

Arnhem. Schilfgaarde, Anton B. van

[Arnhem]. Retired archivist,

Arnhem. Schmidt, Willem [Kesteren].

Schoolteacher, Arnhem. Schoenmakers, Anna Maria P.

[Groesbeek]. Housewife,

Groesbeek. Schol, Annie just. [Hoenderlo].

Hoenderlo. Schouten, Antonius C. [Nijmegen].

Retired, Nijmegen. Schrijvers, Leon [Veghel]. Heart

specialist, Eindhoven. Schulte, Marinus Jacobus [Arnhem].

Doctor (retired), Arnhem. Schut, Jacoba Adriana [Oosterbeek].

Housewife, Doorwerth. Schutter, Marinus [Elst]. Retired,

Elst. Schuurs, Wilhelmus Antonius

[Tilburg]. Bank manager,

Wijchen. Six, Pieter Jacob [Amsterdam].

Chairman, Combined Military Funds,

's Gravelande. Slingerland, Johannus C. [Deurne].

Inspector of the P.t.t.,

Leidschendam. Smeenk, Bernard Daniel

[Renkum]. Protestant

minister, Jerusalem. Smeets, Henricus Johannes J.

[Roermond]. Notary, Oss. Smulders, Robert M. [Utrecht,

Nijmegen]. Company director,

Soest.

Snoek, Johannes M. [Renkum].

Minister, Israel. Snoek, Maria [Renkum]. Church

social worker, Schiedam. Soet, Frans de [Oosterbeek].

Chief agricultural engineer, State

Forest Administration, Zeist. Spaander, Jan [Amsterdam]. General

Director, Public Health, Ministry of

Social Affairs and Public Health,

Bilthoven. Spoormans-van Berendonk, Maria

Josepha [Westerhoven]. Housewife,

Veldhoven. Sprangers, Waltherus [Nijmegen].

Retired, Nijmegen. Steinfort, Johannes Bertus [Arnhem].

Works employeeeaDen Haag. Stibbe-van Adelsberg, Elma Sara

[Renkum]. Psychiatric social

worker, Israel. Stranzky, Antonia Maria [Arnhem].

Nursing sister, Arnhem. Striker, Jan [Oosterbeek]. Plumber,

Oosterbeek. Struik Dalm-van der Stad, Maria

Christina [Nijmegen]. Housewife,

Nijmegen. Symons, Sister M. Dosith@ee

[Nijmegen]. Buyer of hospital

supplies, Nijmegen. Tempel, Johannes W. [Nijmegen].

Municipal employee, Town Hall,

Nijmegen. Teunissen, Waandert [Velp].

Coppersmith, plumber, Velp. Thomas, Carl Paulus Nicolaas ['s

Hertogenbosch]. Enterprise director,

Switzerland. Thuys-Damon, Bernardina [Arnhem].

Retired, Arnhem. Thyssen, Augustinus A. J. W.

[Beuningen]. Company

director, Nijmegen. Tiburtius, Father Bernardus C. N.

[Oss]. Rector, St. Joseph

Monastery, Oyen. Tiemans, Willem Hendrik [Arnhem].

Architect, Oosterbeek. Tiemans, Cornelis Lieuwe

[Oosterbeek]. Director, Conference

Center, St. Michielsgestel. Tigler Wybrandi, Adrianus, Lt.

[U.s. 101/ Airborne Div.].

Company director, The Hague. Top, Gerrit van den [Ede]. Retired,

Ede. Uijen, Albertus Franciscus

[Nijmegen]. Municipal employee;

head of Dept. of Information and Cultural

Affairs, Nijmegen. Unck, Nicolaas [Arnhem]. Schiedam

municipality worker, Schiedam. Valk, Hendrik [Arnhem]. Artist,

Arnhem. Ven, Henricus Cornelis van de

[Dinther]. Company director,

Dinther. Venderbosch, Anna Berendina

[Oosterbeek]. Social worker,

Oosterbeek. Verhamme, Gerardus H. A.

[Ravestein]. Town official,

Berghem. Verwegen, Wilhelmus J. [Vinkel].

Works employee, Veghel. Visser, Cornelis Marinus de

[Veghel]. Elementary-school teacher,

Loosbroek. Visser, Maria D. de [Veghel].

Export manager, Den Bosch. Vliet, Leendert R. van, Sgt.

[Princess Irene Brigade].

Warrant officer, Netherlands Defense

Forces, The Hague. Vlist, Hendrika van der [Oosterbeek].

English teacher, Oosterbeek. Voskuil, Bertha [Oosterbeek].

Housewife, Oosterbeek. Voskuil, Jan [Oosterbeek].

Chemical engineer, Oosterbeek. Vries, Izak de

[Oosterbeek]. Librarian,

Israel. Vromen, Abraham [Arnhem]. Company

director, Doetinchem. Vroemen, Lucianus Paulus J.

[Arnhem]. Sales representative,

Amsterdam. Waard, Willem de [Vlaardingen].

Office clerk, Voorburg. Wachters, Johannes Bernardus H.

[Aalst]. Insurance physician, Berg

en Dal. Weerd, Nicolaas van de [Bennekom].

Banking officer, Bennekom. Wely, Paul Agatho van [Zetten].

Medical doctor, Son. Werz, Petrus Franciscus A.

[Eindhoven]. Entrepreneur,

Roosendaal. Westerveld, Carel Christiaan

[Amsterdam]. State official,

Rijswijk. Wiessing, George Efraim J.

[Arnhem]. Retired, Arnhem. Wijburg, Hendrik [Wolfheze].

Retired Ede. Wijdeven, Marinus Antonius van de

[Mariahout]. Contractor, Mariahout.

Wijgerden, Antonie van [Geldrop].

Information official, N.v. Philips,

Eindhoven. Wijnbergen, Selma [Breugel].

Textile worker, Eindhoven. Wijnen, Alphonse, 1/ Lt. [Princess

Irene Brigade]. Lt. Col., commander

of infantry, Garrison, Eindhoven. Wijt, Adriaan [Arnhem]. Retired,

Hoenderlo. Wit, Adrianus de, Sgt. [Princess

Irene Brigade]. Warrant officer,

Royal Constabulary, Breda. Wit, Gerardus Johannes de [Zeelst].

Retired, Zeelst. Wit, Karel de [Oosterbeek].

Druggist, Oosterbeek. Woensel, Cornelis H. van

[Eindhoven]. Controller, Eindhoven. Woestenburg, Frederik J.
[Schijndel].

Roman Catholic priest,

Leende. Woezik, Johanna Maria van

[Eindhoven]. Hotelkeeper,

Eindhoven. Wolffensperger-van der Wegen, Helena

Elizabeth [Vlokhoven-Woensel].

Housewife, Heusden aan de Maas. Wolters, Arnoldus, Lt. Comdr.
[Royal

Netherlands Navy]. Head Commissioner,

Rotterdam Municipal Police,

Rotterdam. Zanten, Wilhelmus Johannes van

[Arnhem]. Section official,

electric company, Arnhem. Zweden-R@yser, Suze van [Arnhem].

Mathematics teacher, Arnhem.

POLISH Sosabowski, Stanislaw, * Maj. Gen.

[C.o., 1/ Polish Airborne

Brigade]. Chwastek, Mieczyslaw, Pvt. [3rd

Battalion]. Turner, Manchester,

England. Juhas, Woll W., S/sgt.

[Engineers]. Slinger,

Derbyshire, England. Kaczmarek, Stefan, 1/ Lt.

[Supplies]. Bank clerk,

Sydenham, England. Kochalski, Alexander, Cpl. [Engineers].

Motor mechanic, Surrey, England.

(now known as Michael Alexander.) Korob, Wladijslaw, Cpl. [Brigade

Hq. Co.]. Car mechanic,

Rotterdam, Holland. Lesniak, Jerzy, Lt. [1/

Battalion]. Goldsmith, London,

England. Niebieszczanski, Adam, Cadet

[Signal Co.]. Office manager,

Westbury, N.y. Prochowski, Robert L., 1/ Lt. [3rd

Battalion]. Senior control buyer,

Chicago, Ill. Szczygiel, Wieslaw, Lt.

[Engineers]. Photographer, Leven,

Fife, Scotland. (now known as George

W. Harvey.) Smaczny, Albert T., Lt.

[3rd Battalion].

Foreman, Cambridge, England. Wojewodka, Boleslaw S., Cpl. [1/

Battalion]. Underwriter for insurance

company, Island Park, N.y.

GERMAN Bittrich, Wilhelm, SS Lt. Gen.

[II SS Panzer Corps].

Retired. Rundstedt, Gerd von, * Field Marshal,

Commander in Chief [OB West,

Oberbefehlshaber West]. Student, Kurt, Col. Gen., C.o.

[1/ Parachute Army]. Retired. Bang, Helmut, Pvt. [Ind. Eng.

Battalion]. Locksmith. Becker, Otto, Pvt. [2nd SS

Panzer Antitank Regt.].

Salesman. Berthold, G@unter, Cpl. [Luftwaffe

Flak Battery 591]. Commercial

traveler. Blumentritt, Gunther, * Maj. Gen.

[OB West; Von Rundstedt's chief of

staff]. Borkenhagen, Hans, Lt. [Infantry,

Reg. 1036]. Civil servant. Brandt, Georg, Cpl. [Luftwaffe RR

Flak Unit]. Civil servant. Brandt, Theo, Pvt. [Grenadier

Battalion], University purchasing

manager. Burg, Wilhelm von der, Cpl.

[Luftwaffe Flak Antiaircraft

Unit]. Merchant. Busch, Karl Martin, Pvt.

[Kampfgruppe Knaust]. Operates

commercial-inquiry office.

Dessloch, Otto, Col. Gen., C.o.

[3rd Luftwaffe Air Fleet].

Retired. Fiebig, Werner, Pvt. [SS Panzer

Grenadiers Depot Battalion 16].

Unknown. Fromm, Wolgang, Ordinance Officer

[59th Infantry Div.].

Horticultural business owner. Gehrhardt, Erwin, Sgt.

[Artillery Regt.]. Civil

servant. Gl@ucks, Paul, Sgt. [Regiment

Jungwirt]. Member of West-German

Broadcasting Company. Haberman, Heinz, Sgt.

[Luftnachrichteneinheit]. Civil

servant. Harmel, Heinz, Maj. Gen., C.o.

[10th SS Panzer Div.].

Manufacturers' representative. Harzer, Walter, Lt. Col., C.o.

[9th SS Panzer Div.]. Consulting

engineer. Heck, Erwin, Liaison Officer [SS

Training Battalion, Arnhem].

Salesman. Heydte, Friedrich von der, Lt. Col.,

C.o. [6th Parachute Regt.].

Professor, international law. Hilberg, J@urgen, Cpl. [Luftwaffe

Comm. Battalion]. Civil servant. Hoffman, Heinz-Jurgen, Gunner
[15th

Army Artillery Battalion]. Dairy

manager. Huck, Werner, Col.

[Flakbrigade 19]. Retired. Jansen, Georg, Pvt. [Engineers].

Farmer. Jupe, Horst, Cpl. [9th SS Panzer

Div.]. Accountant. Knaust, Hans Peter, Maj., C.o.

[Kampfgruppe Knaust, with 10th SS

Panzer Div.]. Retired. Krafft, Sepp, Major, C.o. [Panzer

Grenadiers Training and Reserve

Battalion 16]. Police official. Lange, Hans, Maj. [Flak Unit].

Retired. Laurenz, Josef, Pvt. [II

Paratroop Replacement and Training

Regt., Hermann G@oring Panzer

Div.]. Store owner. Liermann, Werner, Sgt. [10th SS

Panzer Div.]. Painter. Linnenbr@ugger, Erwin, Pvt. [Infantry

Regt. 364]. Publishers'

representative. Liss, Gerhard, Pvt. [II Paratroop

Replacement and Training Regt.,

Hermann G@oring Panzer

Div.]. Salesman. Majewski, Alfred, Maj.

[Antiaircraft Unit 591].

Office clerk. Moll, Jakob, Sgt. [Grenadier Regt.

520]. Police official. Moll, Luise [Civilian].

Housewife. M`unks, Karl, Pvt. [84th Infantry

Div.]. Farmer. Nedel, Gerhard, 1/ Lt. [Supply

Battalion 801]. Retired. Niemann, Charlotte, Red Cross nurse

[Apeldoorn]. Medical

statistician. Pemsel, Max, Maj. Gen. [Chief of

Staff, Seventh Army]. Lt. Gen.

(retired), German Army. Petersen, Emil, M/sgt. [Reich Work

Service]. Electrical engineer. Poppe, Walter, Lt. Gen., C.o.

[59th Infantry Div.]. Retired. Pr@umen, Josef, Pvt. [Reich Work

Service]. Insurance broker. Reichardt, Hans-Joachim, 1/

Lt. [Luftwaffe]. Captain. Ringsdorf, Alfred, Pvt. [10th SS

Panzer Div.]. Sales

representative. Robeus, Hermann, Pvt. [Luftwaffe

Paratroop Regt.]. Tax consultant. Rohrbach, Wilhelm, Cpl.

[Self-propelled Gun Brigade

280]. Delicatessen owner. Rose, Heinz, Sgt. [Kampfgruppe

Harskamp]. Construction engineer. Savelsbergh, Matthias, Pvt.

[Engineers]. Retired. Schepers, Bernhard, Pvt. [5th Co.].

Retired. Schmidt, Heinz, Cpl. [Luftwaffe

Regt. 201]. Telephone engineer. Sedelhauser, Gustav, 1/ Lt.

[Model's Hq., Transportation

Chief]. Brewer. Seesemann, Hans, Sgt. [Military

Police]. Printer. Sick, Josef, Cpl. [9th SS Panzer

Div.]. Truck driver. Skalka, Dr. Egon, Maj.

[9th SS Panzer Div.].

Physician. Stelzenm@uller, Herbert, Cadet [German

Naval Hospital, Cleves].

Metallurgist.

Strobel, Walter, Sgt. [Antiaircraft

Unit]. Retired. Tempelhof, Hans von, Col. [Model's

Hq.]. Retired. Tersteegen, Peter, Pvt. [Infantry

Reserves Battalion--Wehrkreis--

IV]. Telephone engineer. Ullmann, Harry, Cpl. [10th SS

Panzer Div.]. Plant superintendent. Weber, Horst, Pvt. [10th SS
Panzer

Div.]. Manufacturer. Weber, Max, Cpl. [15th Paratroopers

Regt.]. Physician. Wienand, Wolfgang, Pvt.

[Antiaircraft Unit 591].

Salesman.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 636-637

At this writing almost thirty years have passed since World War II and,
in spite of voluminuous Allied and German records, the trail is growing
cold for the contemporary historian in search of survivors. Many
leading personalities are dead, and gone with them are the answers to
many baffling questions. Of all the major plans and campaigns
following the invasion of Normandy none was more significant than
Operation Market-Garden. Yet--apart from some personal memoirs and a
few chapters in official and semiofficial histories--the tragic story
is virtually unknown in the United States. The successful role of the
82nd and 101/ Airborne in the battle--in particular, the crossing of
the Waal by Gavin's troops--rarely merits more than a paragraph or two
in British accounts.

The stand of the British 1/ Airborne Division at Arnhem remains one of
the greatest feats of arms in World War II military history. But it
was also a major defeat-- Britain's second Dunkirk. Thus, as
bureaucracies often tend to hide their failures, documentation in both
American and British archives is all too frequently scanty and hard to
come by. To unscramble some of the riddles and to present what I
believe is the first complete version of the combined
airborne-ground-attack invasion from the standpoint of all
participants--Allied, German, Dutch underground and civilian--has taken
me the best part of seven years. There were times during that period,
especially when I fell seriously ill, that I despaired of the book's
ever reaching publication.

As in my previous works on World War II --The Longest Day (1959) and
The Last Battle (1966)--the backbone of information came from the
participants: the men of the Allied Forces, the Germans they fought and
the courageous Dutch civilians. In all, some twelve hundred people
contributed to the making of A Bridge Too Far. Unselfishly and without
stint these military personnel, ex-soldiers, and civilians gave freely
of their time in interviews, showed me over the battlefield and
supplied documentation and details from diaries, letters, military
monographs, telephone logs, carefully preserved after-action reports,
maps and photographs. Without the help of such contributors (whose
names are listed on preceding pages under the heading "What They Do
Today") the book could not have been written.

For a variety of reasons--among them duplication, lack of corroboration
and sheer bulk --not every personal story or experience could be
included. Of

the twelve hundred contributors, more than half were interviewed and
about four hundred of these accounts were used. But after thirty years
memory is not infallible. Certain strict guidelines, similar to
research procedures used in my previous books, had to be followed.
Every statement or quote in the book is reinforced by documentary
evidence or by the corroboration of others who heard or witnessed the
event described. Hearsay, rumor or third-party accounts could not be
included. My files contain hundreds of stories that may be entirely
accurate but cannot be supported by other participants. For reasons of
historical truth, they were not used. I hope the many contributors
will understand.

So many individuals helped me in reconstructing the nine terrible days
of Market-Garden that it is difficult to know where to begin in naming
them. At the onset, however, I want especially to thank His Royal
Highness, Prince Bernhard for his time and aid in locating and
suggesting people to be interviewed and for providing me access to both
Dutch and British archives. My warm thanks goes also to De Witt and
Lila Wallace of the Reader's Digest. They not only underwrote much of
the cost of this history but made their reporters and researchers in
bureaus both in America and Europe available to me. Among these I wish
particularly to thank the following: Heather Chapman, of New York;
Julia Morgan, of Washington, D.c.; Michael Randolph, of London; John D.
Panitza, John Flint, Ursula Naccache and Giselle Kayser, of Paris; the
late Arno Alexi, of Stuttgart; Aad van Leeuwen, Jan Heijn, Liesbeth
Stheeman and Jan van Os, of Amsterdam.

A special paragraph must be devoted to the tireless, painstaking work
of Frederic Kelly, who for two years acted as my assistant. His
research, interviews and fine journalistic procedures in England,
Holland and the United States proved invaluable, as did his photographs
of the participants as they are today.

Thanks must also be expressed to the U.s. Defense Department's Office
of the Chief of Military History under command of Brigadier General Hal
C. Pattison (at the time of researching) and the assistants who aided
me in developing the military framework--in particular, Ditmar M. Finke
and Hannah Zeidlik. Another whose help and encouragement must be
mentioned is Charles B. MacDonald of O.c.m.h., whose detailed The
Siegfried Line Campaign contains a fine and accurate version of
Market-Garden. I also depended greatly on Breakout and Pursuit by
Martin Blumenson, whose work appears in the official O.c.m.h.
historical series. And I express my thanks, once again, to Dr.
Forrest C. Pogue for his detailed command structure in O.c.m.h.'s The
Supreme Command.

For their help in locating veterans and arranging interviews throughout
the United States and Europe, acknowledgment must go to the officers
of

the U.s. Defense Department's Magazine and Book Division--Colonel
Grover G. Heiman, Jr., U.s.a.f. (ret.), Chief of Division; Lieutenant
Colonel Charles W. Burtyk, Jr., U.s.a. (deputy); Lieutenant Colonel
Robert A. Webb, U.s.a.f.; Miss Anna C. Urband; and, in the Office of
the Adjutant General, Seymour J. Pomrenze.

For the German research I am indebted to the following in the U.s.
Defense Department's World War II Records Division: Dr. Robert W.
Krauskopf, Director; Herman G. Goldbeck, Thomas E. Hohmann, Lois C.
Aldridge, Joseph A. Avery, Hazel E. Ward, Caroline V. Moore, and
Hildred F. Livingston. Without a complete understanding of the German
war diaries and monographs provided, it would have been almost
impossible for me to accurately interview the German participants,
particularly the SS commanders--Lieutenant General Wilhelm Bittrich,
Major General Heinz Harmel and Lieutenant Colonel Walter Harzer--who
for the first time told their version of Market-Garden to an
American.

In the Netherlands my assistants and I received the most gracious
Co-operation from the Dutch archive authorities. I am most grateful to
Professor Dr. Louis de Jong, Director of the State Institute for War
Documentation; Jacob Zwaan, archivist; the curator of the Arnhem
Airborne Museum, Mr. B. G. J. de Vries; and Dr. Eduard and Mrs.
Emmie Groeneveld. In the Military History section of the Royal Army of
the Netherlands pertinent research was made available to my assistants
by many people, among them Lieutenant Colonel Gerrit van Oyen;
Lieutenant Colonel August Kneepkens; Captain Gilbert Frackers; Captain
Hendrik Hielkema. So detailed was the Dutch help that I was even
provided with scale maps, drawings and photographs of the various
Market-Garden bridges. Of particular help was Louis Einthoven, postwar
Dutch security and intelligence chief, for his assistance in unraveling
the story of Cornelius "King Kong" Lindemans, the Dutch spy.

Of vital importance were the municipal archives in Arnhem, Nijmegen,
Veghel and Eindhoven, where an abundant amount of background material
was located and examined. I am deeply indebted to the following in
these centers: Klaas Schaap, Anton Stempher, Dr. Pieter van Iddekinge
(arnhem); Albertus Uijen and Petrus Sliepenbeek (nijmegen); Jan
Jongeneel (veghel); Frans Kortie (eindhoven).

Among the many contributors in Holland who deserve special mention are
Jan and Kate ter Horst and Jan and Bertha Voskuil of Oosterbeek, who
spent hours with me going over every detail of the last days of the 1/
Airborne's ordeal in their village. Jan Voskuil took me over the
battlefields, and Mr. and Mrs. Ter Horst unraveled the mystery
surrounding the Driel ferry for the first time. In Driel the Baltussen
family gave me hours of detailed interviews which proved invaluable.
And for checking and reading Dutch

interviews I must also express my appreciation to a magnificent
journalist, A. Hugenot van der Linden, of the Amsterdam Telegraaf.
Without his watchful eye I would most certainly have made many a
mistake. So, too, for Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters, now
Rotterdam's Commissioner of Police, who provided me with an almost
minute-by-minute account of the happenings at General Urquhart's
headquarters. In Oosterbeek the Maanen family provided extraordinary
diaries and interviews, as did Hendrika van der Vlist, whose meticulous
notes, like those of the Maanens, gave a clear picture of the situation
in the casualty stations. Their vivid records and extraordinary help
enabled me to re-create the atmosphere. I am deeply grateful to all of
them.

Among the many military contributors who must be singled out for
special thanks are General James M. Gavin, General Maxwell D. Taylor,
General Roy Urquhart and Colonel Charles Mackenzie-- all of whom sat
patiently through countless interviews. Others who were most helpful
were Major General John D. Frost; Colonel Eric M. Mackay; Major General
Philip H. W. Hicks; General John Hackett; Brigadier George S.
Chatterton; Brigadier Gordon Walch, Mr. Brian Urquhart; the late Major
General Stanislaw Sosabowski; and Chaplain G. A. Pare, whose notes
constitute an unforgettable, poignant document. Lady Browning (daphne
du Maurier) with her wit and common sense proved a delightful
correspondent and set straight some of the myths of Arnhem.

In Germany I was assisted greatly in tracing survivors and locating
background material, monographs and war diaries by Dr. Bliesener of
Bonn's Press and Information Service; Lieutenant Colonel Siegel of the
Ministry of Defense; Dr. Wolfgang von Groote and Major Forwick of the
Military History Research Department; and Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Stahl
of the Federal Archives.

There are many, many others whose support and assistance made this book
possible. I must again thank my wife, Kathryn, a writer herself, who
organized and collated research, edited and watched for my dangling
participles. Also, when I was most seriously ill, I thank with all my
heart the ministrations of my good friend, Dr. Patrick Neligan,
together with Dr. Willet Whitmore, who in some miraculous way pulled
me through and kept me going. Again, also my thanks to Jerry Korn, my
chief "nitpicker"; Suzanne Gleaves and John Tower, who read the
manuscript so carefully; Anne Bardenhagen, my valued friend and
assistant; Judi Muse and Polly Jackson, who, at various times, worked
as secretaries. My thanks also go to Paul Gitlin, my agent; Peter
Schwed and Michael Korda of Simon and Schuster for their suggestions;
and Hobart Lewis, President of the Reader's Digest, who waited
patiently through all the travail.

Index 641-651

Aa, Rudolph van der, 24 Aa river, 134, 251 Aachen, 54, 64, 72 Aalst,
356, 358, 359 Adair, Gen. Allan, 167, 413, 471, 478, 479 Albert Canal,
38, 39, 45, 49-51, 60, 115, 147 Albrecht Group, 144fn. Aldeburgh,
England, 190, 195 Allardyce, Pvt. James, 173, 289 Allen, Pfc. John,
175 Allied Intelligence Committee, 68 Allied First Airborne Army, 68,
82-84, 112, 122, 133, 162

friction in leadership, 126-27

Market preparation, 172, 180-181

Market takeoff and combat, 188, 209, 355, 395, 541

see also Brereton, Lt. Gen. L. H. Allsop, Capt. David, 228, 260,

Altomare, Cpl. John, 214 Ambrose, Stephen E., 89fn. Amsterdam, 25, 26
Antwerp--

Allied capture of, 20, 33, 37, 40, 44-45, 48, 51, 59-61

Allied error at, 61, 163

as Allied supply base, 33, 67, 74, 78, 83, 88

in German calculations, 37, 44-45, 51, 55-59

in Montgomery's plans, 55, 64, 68 Apeldoorn, 20, 116, 486, 594
Aremberg, Germany, 51 Arnhem, 138-42, 154, 181, 182, 195, 218, 323,
342, 386-387, 534, 599

German occupation, 160-61, 206, 263

German retreat through, 16-17, 21-26

Panzer divisions near, 47, 115-116, 132-33, 139, 144-145, 156fn.,
157-59, 162, 177,

Allied bombing of, 202-9, 222

Allied landing at, 216fn., 222, 229, 290, 365, 368-76, 419

fighting in, 329-31, 342-47, 389-390, 402-5; see also Arnhem bridge,
battles at

civilians in, 331-35, 343-44, 348-49, 352-53, 510

liberation rumors, 26-27, 261, 332

resistance organization, 27-29, 47, 144-45, 334-35, 395-396,

Arnhem bridge, 272-73

objective of Operation Comet, 82, 84, 88, 89

objective of Market-Garden, 123, 138-39, 177-78, 229, 231, 233, 254,
255

in Market-Garden planning, 122, 128-30, 165-66, 169-70, 259, 264, 268

airborne troops race to, 179, 233, 256-58, 262, 265-266, 270-71

battles for, 148fn., 244, 323-34, 350-54, 376-80, 388-93, 396-403,
414-15, 433-40

British defeat, surrender at, 442-443, 446-56, 479-85, 500, 515, 536,
558fn. Arnhem Town Museum, 402 Arnold, Gen. Henry H., 83 Ashworth,
S/sgt. Walton, 530 Atlantic Wall, 30, 31, 36 Atwell, Sgt. Douglas,
420 Axel (village), 28

Baarskamp farm, 505-6 Back, L/cpl. Harold, 276-77, 324 Bad Saarnow,
Germany, 232, 233 Ballantyne, FirstO A. 422fn. Baltussen, Cora, 17,
336-37, 422-423, 504-6, 537, 581, 595 Baltussen, Josephus, 505
Baltussen family, 639 Barlow, Col. Hilary, 182, 409-10,

Barnett, Lieut. J. Patrick, 436 Barry, Lieut. Peter, 269 Baylis,
S/sgt. George S., 181,

BBC, 25, 27, 341, 392, 401, 438 Beaudin, Capt. Briand, 236 Bedell,
Major Edwin A., 176 Bedford, FirstSgt. Ronald, 370 Beek, Dirk van,
383-84 Beek, Dr. Marius van der, 204 Beekbergen, 116, 146, 201
Belgium, 16, 19, 23, 33, 60, 69, 71, 80, 163, 211 Bemmel, 489 Bennett,
Pvt. Frederick, 263 Bennett, Pvt. Henry, 343 Bentley, Sgt. Thomas,
582 Berlin, projected drive on, 63, 73-78, 85-89, 113 Bernhard, Prince
of the Netherlands, 20, 27, 61-63, 202, 508-10, 597, 638

meeting with Montgomery, 63, 79-82 Best (village), 134, 252, 360-61,
368, 424-26 Bestebreurtje, Capt. Arie D., 188, 288, 335, 429, 474fn.
Beveland peninsula, 51, 115; see also South Beveland Biddle, Anthony,
63 Bijltjesdag ("Hatchet Day"),

Bittrich, Dr. Gerhard, 148fn. Bittrich, Lt. Gen. Wilhelm, 147-151,
200, 219, 284, 377,

retreat from Belgium, 46-47, 115-16, 156fn.

reaction to Market landing, 201, 229-30, 232-33, 253-56, 280

disagreement with Model, 254, 290-91, 379-80, 453

battle at Arnhem, 256, 271, 280, 282-83, 290-91, 377-81, 389, 411fn.,
414, 440, 453, 515-16, 555

battle at Nijmegen, 283, 291, 378-81, 453-54, 473-74, 516, 519, 544-46
Blaskowitz, Gen. Johannes, 39, 43 Blitzkrieg, 32, 33 Blokland, Major
Jonkheer Jan Beelaerts van, 167-68 Blue, Cpl. James R., 288 Blumenson,
Martin, 50fn. Blumentritt, Maj. Gen. Gunther, 32, 45fn., 53-55, 59
Blunt, Lieut. John, 450 Blyton, Pvt. Henry, 582 Bode, Nicholaas
Tjalling de, 144fn., 161, 395, 396 Boeree, Lt. Col. Theodor A.,
388fn. Bolden, Bombardier E. C., 550, 561 Boldock, Pvt. Walter,
263-64, 403,

Bommer, Cpl. Jack, 176, 194,

Borrelli, 2nd Lieut. Anthony N.,

Both, Dominee, 206 Boyce, Pvt. Robert, 215 Brace, Cpl. Terry "Taffy,"
406-7, 526-27, 592-93 Bradley, Gen. Omar N., 63-68, 71, 72, 75, 83,
84, 112 Bradwell Bay, 190, 195 Brandt, Sgt. John Rudolph, 174 Breda,
27 Breebaart, Dr. Leo C., 144 Breman, Johanna, 207 Brereton, Lt. Gen.
Lewis H., 82, 112, 355, 539, 540, 542

planning for Market, 121-30, 134, 180

tiff with Browning, 126-27

and Polish advance, 417, 502 Brett, Capt. Peter, 541fn. British Army
units

Groups 21/ Army Group, 61, 64, 68, 72, 73, 80, 85, 113, 114, 130, 131,
158, 163; see also Montgomery, Bernard L.

Armies Second Army, 11, 79, 131, 162, 200; in Belgium campaign, 33, 51;
in Montgomery planning, 64, 70, 84, 88, 130, 162, 169, 284;
communication with Urquhart, 244, 412, 442, 443, 457, 516, 556, 581;
relief for 1/ Airborne, 540, 547, 566, 594

Corps I Airborne Corps, 125, 389, 391, 539, 540, 566; reports on German
buildup, 114, 131, 133, 159; landing of headquarters, 235, 238, 241,
242; communication, 179, 190, 243, 244, 341; Polish air drop, 442, 499
XXX Corps, 61, 211, 244, 285, 355, 359, 411, 413, 508; in Garden
planning, 59, 123, 130, 132, 163, 164, 166, 170; relief of Airborne at
Arnhem, 325, 350, 398, 408, 442, 495, 498, 516, 564, 580; casualties,
599 Royal Army Service, 421 Royal Engineers, 497 Royal Signal, 243-44

Divisions 1/ Airborne, 138, 172, 177, 180, 335, 386, 407, 408, 507,
637, see also Urquhart, Robert E.; in Market-Garden planning, 84, 88,
117, 122: Market assignment, 123, 128, 144, 157, 177, 228; takeoff and
landing, 190, 191, 228, 280; command succession, 192, 393-95;
communications, 233-34, 335, 341, 408, 416, 506, 538; fighting in
Arnhem area, 266-72, 331, 396-398, 402-7, 409, 440-45, 495-501, 507,
510-16, 521-33, 544-45, 546-64 passim; battle for bridge, 272-75,
276-80, 331, 335, 341-54 passim, 393, 398-401, 414, 433-40, 446-50,
480-86, see also Frost, John D.; withdrawal from Oosterbeek, 568-95;
casualties, 448-450, 483, 591, 599 6th Airborne, 158 11th Armored, 59,
60fn., 61 43rd Wessex, 166, 478, 491, 516-19, 521, 539, 543, 546, 564,
566, 593 50th Northumberland, 166 52nd Lowland, 128

Guards Armored, 165, 356, 410, 413, 508, 518; capture of Antwerp, 59;
in Market-Garden planning, 166, 167, 169; at Nijmegen bridge, 428, 456,
471; relief of Airborne at Arnhem, 477-79, 488, 496-98

Brigades 1/ Airlanding, 224, 225, 338, 368, 370, 376, 515, 578; see
also Hicks, Philip 1/ Parachute, 257, 260, 325, 344, 440, 485; see also
Lathbury, Gerald 4th Parachute, 338, 368-69, 374-75, 390; see also
Hackett, John 8th Armored, 166

Regiments 1/ Airlanding Light, 497 4th Dorset, 564, 566, 570, 571, 577,
581, 591 5th Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, 519, 535 Coldstream
Guards, 453 Dragoon Guards, 520, 535 Glider Pilot, 138, 181, 191, 222,
242, 497, 513, 514, 528, 577; see also Chatterton, George S. Grenadier
Guards, 410, 411, 428, 468, 469; see also Goulburn, Edward H. Household
Cavalry, 356, 357, 411, 517, 519, 520, 535 Irish Guards, 164-68,
245-251, 355-57, 458, 467, 487-91, 519, 591-92; see also Vandeleur,
J.o.e. King's Own Scottish Borderers (Kosb's), 390, 391, 441, 499, 512,
563, 583 South Staffordshires, 390, 402, 405, 407, 409, 441, 497, 499
British Military Cemetery, Arnhem, 422fn. British War Office, 84
Brockley, Pvt. Harold, 198 Broekkamp, Elias, 48, 207 Brook, L/cpl.
Henry, 225 Brooke, Field Marshal Sir Alan, 65 Browning, Lt. Gen.
Frederick, 9, 83, 84, 89

planning Market-Garden, 112, 121, 125-29, 132, 134, 136-42,

dispute with Brereton, 126-27

Market attack, 190-91, 241-44, 287, 365fn.

communication problem, 341, 389, 412, 416-17, 442

battle at Arnhem, 412, 417, 421, 442, 478-79, 495, 500, 507, 516-17,
538-40, 564

battle at Nijmegen, 412-13, 431-33, 442, 453, 457, 462,

withdrawal at Arnhem, 568, 570, 572-73, 590-91 Browning, Lady (daphne
du Maurier), 243fn., 640 Brussels, 16, 20, 59, 63, 83, 155, 508, 509
Bryant, Pvt. Reginald, 373-74 Buchanan, Lieut. Bucky, 438, 450
Buffalo Boy, Herbert, 429 Burgers Zoological Gardens, 332 Burriss,
Capt. T. Moffatt, 459, 462, 465, 467, 468, 475 Byam, Guy, 541fn.

Cain, Major Robert, 529-30, 560-561, 579, 589-90 Callaghan, Sgt. Major
Harry, 262,

Calloway, Sgt. "Cab," 531 Canadian Army, 64 Carmichael, Lieut.
Virgil, 199, 460, 461, 467 Cassidy, Lt. Col. Patrick, 216 Casualties,
Market-Garden, note on,

Cator, Major Harry, 590 Chandler, Trooper William F., 531 Channel
ports, 55, 67, 71, 74,

Chappuis, Lt. Col. Steve, 427 Charteris, Brig. John, 163fn. Chase,
Lt. Col. Charles, 215 Chatterton, Col. George S., 140fn., 191,
242-43, 432-33 Chennell, Cpl. William, 411, 413,

Cherbourg, 70 Chill, Lt. Gen. Kurt, 50 Christiansen, Gen. Friedrich,
152, 153,

Christie, Gunner Robert, 503, 579,

Churchill, Winston S., 65fn., 509 Cipolla, Pfc. John, 211-13 Clarke,
Pvt. Nobby, 528-29 Clegg, Capt. Benjamin, 512 Cleminson, Capt.
James, 347, 377 Clous, Ida, 261 Clous, Dr. Phillip, 525 Coad, Lt.
Col. Aubrey, 569 Cockrill, Signalman James, 578, 580-81, 587 Cole, Lt.
Col. Robert G., 173,

Combined Allied Intelligence Committee, 68 Combined Chiefs of Staff,
76, 77 Congressional Medal of Honor, 361 Connelly, Capt. John, 242
Cook, Major Julian A., 456-61, 462fn., 463, 465, 466, 468, 476, 477
Copas, T/sgt. Marshall, 174 Copley, Signalman Stanley G., 181,

Coppens, Wilhelmina, 18 Corrie, Capt. Michael, 528 Cottesmore,
England, 181 Cowan, Sgt. Bertie, 250 Coyle, Lieut. James J., 190,
236, 430-31 Crawley, Major Douglas, 273, 274, 450, 484 Crete, 38
Cronkite, Walter, 216fn. Crook, L/bombardier J. W., 225

Daalen, Toon van, 29, 161, 334 Dauncey, Lieut. Michael, 224 Davis,
S/sgt. George, 224 Deane-Drummond, Major Anthony, 179, 180, 233-34,
258, 404-5 Deelen airfield, 139, 152, 539 Demetras, Lieut. A. D., 477
Dempsey, Lt. Gen. Miles C., 59, 61, 83-84, 114, 131, 133, 162, 412,
478, 540, 566, 568 Derksen, Antoon, 348-49, 407 Dessloch, Col. Gen.
Otto, 152 Deuss, Albert, 161 Diest, 80 Dijk, Sister Christine van, 25
Dijker, Rev. Reinhold, 23 Dobie, Lt. Col. D., 257, 263-65, 344, 389,
398, 402-4, 441 Doetinchem, 116, 201, 219, 232, 253, 256, 282, 283, 544
Doggart, L/cpl. James, 247,

Dohun, S/sgt. Charles, 174, 426-427 Dolle Dinsdag ("Mad Tuesday"),
18,

Dommel river, 251, 357, 358 Doorman, Maj. Gen. "Pete," 508
Doornenburg, 455, 464 Dordrecht, 38 Dover, Major Victor, 269, 273 Down
Ampney, 417 Downing, Pvt. Robert, 579 Dreyeroord Hotel, Oosterbeek,
512 Driebergen, 154-55 Driel, Holland, 336, 337

German retreat through, 15-17

Polish airlanding at, 442, 445, 499, 502-6, 508, 515, 517, 537,

British relief drive to, 517-21, 535, 538, 542-46, 564-570

evacuation of Arnhem force, 570, 576, 581, 590, 595

Driel-Heveadorp ferry, 336-37, 371, 387-88, 442, 446, 451-52, 499

disappearance of, 500-02, 506, 516 DUKW'S, 520, 521, 536, 537, 570, 577
Dullforce, Pvt. Alfred, 588-89 Du Maurier, Daphne, 243fn., 640
Dunning, Sgt. John, 253 Dunkerly, Col. Vincent, 399 Dutch Army, 288,
508

Princess Irene Brigade, 79, 166, 167, 509fn.

Ede, 24, 28 Edwards, Pvt. Robert C., 338, 390, 404, 499-500 Edwards,
Pvt. Roy N., 191, 264 Eerde, 22 Egan, Rev. Bernard M., 397, 436-439,
450 Eijkelhoff, Jan, 29, 384, 522 Eindhoven, 18-19, 134, 155, 156, 251,
280, 290, 355, 501

German retreat through, 21, 48

Allied bombing of, 202, 222

captured by 101/ Airborne, 359

air battle near, 366, 457

Market and Garden link-up in,

in Market-Garden planning, 165, 166, 190, 252 Eisenhower, Gen. Dwight
D., 11, 21, 33, 52, 54, 65, 75, 131, 281, 412, 539-40

Montgomery's proposals, 61, 63-89 passim, 113, 571

problems of supply, maintenance, 67-72, 75, 78-79

OK'S Market-Garden, 88, 113, 158, 571 El Alamein, 31 Elden, 141, 416,
445 Elst, 350, 353, 473, 487, 489-91, 508, 515, 516, 518-20, 543-45
Emery, Sapper Ronald T., 227,

Enschede, 403 Epse, 146 Escaut Canal, 169, 171, 518 Essame, Brig.
Hubert, 163fn., 164, 519 Euling, Capt. Karl Heinz, 430-31, 455, 464,
468, 469, 473 Eusebius Buiten Singel, Arnhem, 323, 328, 333, 352, 433,
446 Eusebiusplein, 333

Faulkner, Pvt. Maurice, 405 Ferguson, Capt. Arthur, 199 Finkbeiner,
Sgt. Theodore, 459, 465 First Allied Airborne Army, see Allied First
Airborne Army Fisher-Rowe, Major E., 359 Fitch, Lt. Col. J.a.c., 257,
263, 265, 272, 343, 344, 389, 398, 402-4, 441 FitzGerald, Major Desmond
R. S., 459, 488 Fitzgerald, Capt. Eamon, 249-50 Fitzpatrick, Sgt.
Francis, 371-72 Formoy, Cpl. Leonard, 530-31 France, 16, 23, 43, 69,
80 Frankfurt, 64, 72 Franklin, Benjamin, 122 Freyberg, Col. Leodegard,
210, 219 Frost, Lt. Col. John D., 182-83, 450, 640

airlanding at Arnhem, 227-28

march to bridge, 257-60, 265-273

battle at bridge, 273-77, 289, 292, 323-485 passim

deserted and defeated, 443, 479, 484, 485, 498

problem of casualties, 448-50, 483 Fuller, Sgt. Clark, 463

Gale, Lt. Gen. Sir Humphrey,

Gale, Gen. Richard, 126, 158 Gallipoli, 576 Garzia, Pvt. John, 174

Gavin, Brig. Gen. James M., 136, 411, 478, 541, 599, 640

preparation for Market, 123, 130, 135, 136, 142-43, 172

airlanding and attack, 234-35, 238, 241, 244, 285-87, 366

bridge battles, 361, 363, 364, 366, 412-13, 428, 453, 457, 572

Waal river crossing, 431-33, 451, 453, 457, 478 Geldermalsen, 23
Gensemer, Lieut. Harold, 362 George VI, King, 65fn. Gerbrandy, Pieter
S., 21, 27, 62 German Army units

Army groups Army Group B, 31, 37, 39, 40, 43, 45, 46, 52, 115-17, 281,
282, 378,

Army Group G, 39, 40, 43, 52

Armies First Parachute Army, 38, 50, 147, 250, 254, 378, 452 Seventh
Army, 40, 147 Fifteenth Army, 40, 44-45, 229, 250, 252, 254, 280, 378,
452; Rundstedt's rescue of, 58-59, 114-15, 163, 452; opposing 101/
Airborne at Best, 360, 424

Army Corps II Parachute Corps, 453 II SS Panzer Corps, 147, 201, 229,
232, 254; relocated at Arnhem, 46, 115, 156fn., 396, 546; see also
Bittrich, Wilhelm Afrika Korps, 31

Divisions 9th SS Panzer (hohenstaufen), 149, 150, 200, 201, see also
Harzer, Walter; relocation near Arnhem, 46-47, 115-16, 131-33, 145,
147, 157, 162; resistance to 1/ Airborne, 229-30, 250, 256, 259fn.,
270, 280, 291; battle at bridge, 344, 380, 389, 486, 545, 556 10th SS
Panzer Frundsberg, 149, 150, 572fn., see also Harmel, Heinz; relocation
at Arnhem, 46-47, 115-16, 131-32, 145, 147, 157, 162; resistance to
Market-Garden, 229-230, 250, 256, 259fn., 280, 290-92, 378-81, 389,
454-55, 515, 545; Rhine crossing, 378-81; battle of Arnhem bridge,
454-55 59th Infantry, 115, 252 85th Infantry, 50 176th, 39 719th
Coastal, 38-39, 49, 51

Miscellaneous Units Knaust Kampfgruppe, 454, 455, 515, 516 SS Panzer
Grenadier Training and Reserve Battalion, 143, 256, 266, 274, 324, 430,
431, 469 9th Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, 349 21/ Panzer Grenadier
Regiment, 326 Gerritsen, Rev. Johan, 205 Giebing, William, 385-86
Ginkel Heath, Holland, 369, 374 Giskes, Lt. Col. Hermann, 154-56,
445fn. Gloucestershire, 187 Glover, Lieut. Pat, 176, 368-69, 374, 558
Gerlitz, Walter, 23fn. Goldman, Cpl., 490 Goldthorpe, Sgt. Lawrence,
512, 514 Gorman, Lieut. John, 168-69, 356, 467, 491

Gough, Major C.f.h. "Freddie," 141, 531

Market assignment, 141, 228, 258

airlanding, 228, 258

progress to bridge, 258-60, 263, 267, 272, 275-76

battle at Arnhem bridge, 398-399, 437, 443, 448, 483, 486,

captured, 486 Goulburn, Lt. Col. Edward H., 428-30, 456, 468-70
Graaff, Dr. Pieter de, 24 Grabmann, Maj. Gen. Walter, 152 Gr@abner,
Capt. Paul, 201, 210, 229, 230, 270, 289, 349-353,

Grafton, Major James, 568-71 Graham, Lt. Gen. Miles, 84 Grantham,
Lincolnshire, 172, 174, 176, 190, 416, 419, 451, 541 Grave, 362, 411,
478

bridge at, 135-36, 175-76, 235, 238, 239, 241, 285, 361 Grayburn,
Lieut. John, 324 Green, Sgt. Ginger, 181, 373-74 Greenham Common, 190
Grieve, Gordon, 394 Griffith, Lt. Col. Wilbur, 241 Groesbeek, 23,
238

heights overlooking, 128, 135, 136, 235-37, 244, 285-287, 362 Groot,
Johannes de, 19 Growe, Pvt. Michael, 549 Guingand, Gen. Francis de,
65 Gwatkin, Brig. Norman, 356, 488 Gysbers, Gerhardus, 47, 205

Hackett, Brig. John "Shan," 552, 577-79, 640

Market assignment, 141, 340, 389

desire for Division command, 192, 338-41, 375-77, 392-94, 408

airlanding, 341, 374-75, 408

battles, 389-91, 409, 423, 441-442, 497, 532, 551, 552 Hague, The, 25,
26 Hall, Capt. Raymond S., 173-74 Halliwell, Sgt. Stanley, 414-15
Harmel, Brig. Gen. Heinz, 149-51, 290-92, 331, 353, 377

mission to Berlin, 150-51, 200, 230, 232-33, 256, 290

Rhine crossing, 291, 378, 454

battle, Arnhem area, 380-81, 414-15, 433-34, 454-456, 485, 515, 545-46,
572fn.

battle, Nijmegen area, 381, 430, 454-56, 464, 468-69, 472-74,

Harper, Leonard Sidney, 422fn. Harris, L/cpl. Thomas, 586 Harrison,
Capt. John, 458 Hart, Major Augustin, 241 Hart, Pvt. Leo, 176, 198
Hartenstein Hotel, 272, 385-88, 546, 562, 571

Model's headquarters, 116-17,

British headquarters, 386-88, 392, 396, 407, 408, 440-441, 499, 507,
521, 573, 578,

airlift drop zone, 419, 496, 501,

in ruins, 511, 516, 526

prisoner compound, 576

evacuated by British, 581, 583, 585,

Harzer, Lt. Col. Walter, 149-51, 284, 353, 380

reaction to Market operation, 200-01, 210, 229-30, 256, 266, 270, 283

Arnhem bridge loss, 256, 271, 283, 291

Arnhem Oosterbeek battles, 325-326, 331, 339, 344, 377, 380-81, 512,
545-46, 554-55 Hatch, Sgt. Roy Ernest, 138, 371

Hatfield, England, 189, 190 Hawkings, Angela, 188 Hay, Lieut. Neville,
179, 196, 225, 442, 443, 583

communications breakdown, 243-44

last message from Urquhart, 563-64,

Haysom, Signalman James, 399 Heaps, Lieut. Leo, 345-46 Heathcote,
Lieut. Keith, 246 Heelsum, 261, 500 "Hell's Highway," 424, 533
Helmond, 48 Hendy, L/cpl. Arthur, 399-401, 439 Hengel, Dr. van, 557
Henniker, Lt. Col. Charles, 569 Heumen, 285, 361, 453 Heveadorp, 275,
441, 501; see also Driel-Heveadorp ferry Hexenkessel ("witches'
cauldron"), 511, 553 Heyes, Signalman Stanley, 265 Heywood, Capt.
Tony, 468 Hibbert, Christopher, 234fn. Hibbert, Major Tony, 275-76
Hicks, Brig. Philip "Pip," 531, 577, 578, 589, 640

Market assignment, 140, 258,

airlanding, 189

Division command, 192, 258, 339-41, 375-77, 388, 392-94, 408

Combat operations, 338-42, 371, 388-89, 392-94, 408, 409, 497-98, 531
Hicks, Sapper Tom, 499 Hi.ink, Dirk, 204 Higgins, Brig. Gen. Gerald,
358 Himmler, Heinrich, 149 Hinterholzer, Cpl. Sepp, 233 Hitler,
Adolf--

and Army generals, 30-38, 41-45, 52, 59, 148-49, 263fn., 379

assassination attempts, 42, 148

ban on airborne operations, 38 Hoek, Father Herman, 23 Hoenderloo, 210
Hoepner, Col. Gen. Eric, 148 Hof van Holland, Fort, 459, 464, 466
Holabird, 2nd Lieut. John, 459,

Holland

Army, see Dutch Army

German retreat through, 15-30, 47-48, 62, 80-82

Dutch Nazis, 17, 19-22, 25, 26, 28, 47

liberation hopes, 20-29, 48, 81, 202-3, 332, 337

German invasion, occupation, 16, 38-39, 43, 113, 153-156, 160-61,

government in exile, 21, 182, 509

Allied bombing of, 204-9

Allied invasion of, 81-89, 122-123, 151-56, 280; civilian reactions,
260-62, 384-386, 504-6, 511-13, 522-523, 548-50

resistance movement, 20, 26-29, 153, 155, 161, 204, 287-88, 345-46;
reports on German strength, 26, 47-48, 62, 79-81, 114, 145, 157, 395,
534; communications system, 27, 144, 244, 251, 395; British disdain
for, 80, 334-335, 388, 396, 445fn., 508; combat assistance to Allies,
287-88, 429, 444, 522 Hollingsworth, Sgt. Tom, 223 Honinghutie, 361
Honingsveld, 504 Homoet, 568 Hoof, Jan van, 429, 447fn. Hooff, Dr.
Reinier van, 332 Hopkinson, Lieut. H. S., 518, 521 Horrocks, Gen.
Brian, 59, 61, 79, 164-65, 257, 399fn., 413, 533, 599

Market-Garden task, 123, 164, 539

Market-Garden briefing, 164-69, 356

Garden attack, 245, 249, 251

Waal river crossing, 433, 457, 462,

Arnhem aid question, 478-79, 516-17, 520-21, 533, 534, 539, 542-43,
564, 566, 568-69 Hulleman, Coenraad, 333-34, 353 Hulsen, Johannes, 19
Huner Park, Nijmegen, 430, 469, 471 Hurkx, Johannes, 25 Huygen, Dr.
Frans, 22

Ijssel river, 146 Inglis, Sgt. Walter, 177 Isenekev, Pvt. Melvin,
173, 196 Isherwood, Sgt. Reginald, 264, 331

Jedlicka, Pvt. Joseph, 464 Jedrziewski, Capt. Anthony, 241-242 Jenks,
S/sgt. Gordon, 224-25 Jodl, Col. Gen. Alfred, 38, 39,

Johannahoeve Farm, 391, 409, 423,

Johnson, Capt. LeGrand, 174,

Johnson, Guardsman Leslie, 472,

Johnson, Pfc. Paul, 214 Johnson, Pfc. Ray, 288 Jones, Lieut. A.g.c.
"Tony," 170, 475-76 Jones, Pvt. Alfred, 513 Jones, S/sgt. James, 237
Jones, L/bombardier James F., 547 Jones, Pvt. James H., 531 Jones,
Sgt. Robert H., 397 Jukes, Pvt. G. W., 398 Juliana, Princess, 20, 62
Jullouville, France, 75 Juttner, Maj. Gen. Hans, 232

Kaczmarek, Lieut. Stefan, 417 Kalkschoten, Johan van, 385 Kappel,
Capt. Carl W., 460, 461, 467, 468, 476-77 Karel, Hendrik, 205 Keep,
Capt. Henry Baldwin, 460, 462fn., 466 Keevil, 195 Keller, Pfc. John,
431 Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm, 31,

Kennedy, Maj. Gen. John, 69 Kent, Sgt. Ron, 177, 582 Kessel, Capt.
Lipmann, 557 Kieswetter, Major Friedrich, 154-156 King, Capt. Frank
D., 372-73 King, FirstO Henry Arthur, 420-21 Kitchener, S/sgt.
Joseph,

Kleve, 43 Kluge, Field Marshal Gunther von, 37, 41-43, 45 Knap, Henri,
47-48, 144-47, 161, 335, 396 Knaust, Major Hans Peter, 454-56, 479,
515, 516, 519, 544-545 Koch, Col. Oscar W., 69 Kolchalski, Cpl.
Alexander, 503 Koning, Jaap, 383 Kortie, Frans, 19, 48 Korob, Cpl.
Wladyslaw, 417, 503 Kraats, Wouter van de, 146 Krafft, SS Major Sepp,
143, 230-232, 256, 263, 265-66 Krap, Douw van der, 522 Krebs, Lt. Gen.
Hans, 117, 149, 152, 154, 201, 218-19 Kruyff, Pieter, 27, 47, 144,
161, 206, 334, 335, 395, 396 Kuehl, Capt. Delbert, 459, 462 Kuijk,
Police Sgt. Johannes van, 274fn., 333, 353 Kussin, Major Gen., 231-32,
263, 265

Labouch@ere, Charles, 28-29, 47,

La Chaude Fontaine, 45 Laeken, 63, 79

Langton, Capt. Roland S., 169-170, 248, 487-91, 503, 591 La Prade,
Major James, 252-53 La Riviere, Lieut. Richard, 467,

Laterveer, Dr. Anton, 22 Lathbury, Brig. Gerald, 233, 268, 272, 275,
339, 342-47, 389,

Market-Garden assignment, 140

airlanding, 189, 226

successor to Gen. Urquhart, 192

march to Arnhem bridge, 257-260, 264

absence with Urquhart, 259-60, 266-67, 375, 376, 408, 409

wounded, 409, 557 Lathouwers, Johanna, 251 Leopoldsburg, Belgium, 163,
166, 356 Liddell, Hart, B. H., 60fn. Liggens, FirstO Jeffrey, 422
Lindemans, Christiaan Antonius,

Lindquist, Col. Roy E., 287 Line, S/sgt. Cyril, 196-97 Lloyd George,
David, 163fn. Loder-Symonds, Lt. Col. R. G., 339, 577 Logan, Capt.
James, 397, 439,

London, 84, 88, 170, 187 London Daily Express, 541 London Daily
Telegraph, 72fn. London Times, 541 Long, Lieut. Michael, 513-14 Long,
S/sgt. Richard, 530 Longland, Major Cedric, 557 Lonsdale, Major
Richard, 497, 527-28, 571, 582 Lord, Fl. Lieut. David, 420 Lord, Sgt.
Major J. C., 178, 228, 343 Los, Cornelis, 359 Love, Fl. Lieut.
Donald, 170-71, 357, 488-90 Lower Rhine (neder Rijn), 15, 275
Luftwaffe, 18, 39, 47, 152, 229, 354, 362, 366, 370, 377, 457, 556fn.
Lumb, Cpl. Don, 350-51

Maanen, Anje van, 261, 384, 522, 552, 594 Maanen, Dr. Gerritt van,
261, 522, 552-54, 594 Maanen, Paul van, 552 Maanen family, 640 Maas
river, 123, 135, 238, 239 Maastricht, 26, 202 Maas-Waal Canal, 135,
240, 285,

MacDonald, Charles B., 50fn., 60fn., 467fn. MacFadden, Pvt. Ginger,
371-72 Mackay, Capt. Eric M., 178, 592,

march to Arnhem bridge, 260, 262, 269, 271, 273, 274

battle of Arnhem bridge, 274, 324-25, 333, 350-52, 399-401, 415, 435,
437-439,

defeat and capture, 480-82 Mackenzie, Lt. Col. Charles B., 192, 226,
258-59, 266, 346, 408, 411, 577, 640

Division command problem, 192, 339-40, 375-76, 392, 394

mission for relief, 516-17, 520-521, 536-40, 546 MacLeod, Lieut. Tom,
461, 464 Mahaffey, Lieut. Rupert, 170, 356, 489, 509fn. Mann, Pvt.
Joe E., 361 March, Cambridgeshire, 190 Margate, 196 Marinus, Adrianus,
22 Marples, Signalman Graham, 223-224,

Marshall, Gen. George C., 65, 66,

Marshall, Gen. S.l.a., 159fn., 411 Martin, Capt. Randall, 549, 560
Mason, M/sgt. Charles, 207 Maxted, Stanley, 541fn.

McCardie, Lt. Col. W.d.h., 402, 409-10, 441, 462 McGraw, Pvt.
Robert, 240 Meddaugh, Lieut. William J.,

Medhurst, Pilot Officer R.e.h., 421fn. Megellas, Lieut. James, 199,
462 Memelink, Garrit, 22 Mendez, Lt. Col. John, 175 Metz, 53, 73
Meuse-Escaut Canal, 148, 165, 167, 200, 245, 290, 356 Mijnhart, Jan,
24, 205 Milbourne, Pvt. Andrew, 264, 391-392, 406-7, 527 Miller,
Glenn, 514 Miller, S/sgt. Victor, 222-23, 225, 420, 526 Mitchell,
S/sgt. Charles A., 214 Mitchell, Sgt. Edward, 526 Model, Field
Marshal Walter, 149-152, 154, 200, 282, 344, 378, 599

as OB West, 33, 37, 39, 42-46, 52, 58

and Army Group B, 39, 43, 115-117, 143, 147-48, 203, 210, 218-19, 229,
256, 283

rout from France, Belgium, 39-50 passim, 58

plea to troops, 40, 41, 50

relocation of Panzer Corps, 46-47, 115, 116

reaction to Market-Garden, 201, 210, 218, 219, 232, 253-256, 263fn.,
281-82, 285

bridges at Arnhem, Nijmegen, 254, 291, 377-79, 453, 464, 473

Market-Garden plans, 255, 283, 284, 354

counteroffensive in Holland, 452, 533-34, 544, 566, 569, 572 Moerdijk,
38 Moncur, Sgt. Francis, 181 Montfroy, Harry, 161 Montgomery, Field
Marshal Bernard Law, 9, 45, 55-114 passim, 522

Antwerp blunder, 60fn., 61

and Prince Bernhard, 62-63, 79-81,

and Dutch resistance, 62

meetings with Eisenhower, 65-68, 82-85

and Market-Garden, 11-12, 112-14, 158, 412; see also Operation
Market-Garden

news, intelligence reports, 130-131, 163, 230, 540-41, 591

and Patton, 69, 71, 74

Rundstedt's opinion of, 55-59

"single-thrust" proposal, 63-69, 73-79, 82-114, 571

supply problems, 70-71

withdrawal from Arnhem, 566, 568, 571, 572, 591 Mook area, 453 Morgan,
Gen. Frederick, 75 Morgans, Cpl. Daniel, 178, 550 Morris, Sgt. Dave,
557fn. Mortanges, Lt. Col. Charles Pahud de, 167-68 Mulloy, Lieut.
Patrick, 461, 462 Mulvey, Capt. Thomas, 215 Munford, Major Dennis S.,
199, 341, 352, 388, 498 Municipal Gas Works, Arnhem, 205 M`unster, 284
Murphy, 2nd Lieut. Ernest, 477 Murray, Lt. Col. Iain, 577, 579
Muselaars, Joop, 22 Musis Sacrum, Arnhem, 323, 334 Mussert, Anton,
20-21 Myers, Lt. Col. Eddie, 516-17, 520-21, 536, 538, 570, 571, 573,
577, 585 Myrtle (parachick), 368-69, 558

Nadler, Pvt. Philip H., 175, 176 Napoleon, 168 Nebelwerfer, 231fn.,
406 Neerpelt, 148, 155, 165

Netherlands, see Holland Newbury, 172 Nijmegen, 16, 153, 154, 289,
349-350, 398, 446, 478, 581, 591

German retreat through, 19, 22-46, 48

in Market-Garden planning, 123, 130, 135, 136, 165, 179, 229, 283-87,
378, 412

Allied bombing of, 202, 206-8

Allied landings in, 229, 254, 280, 290, 350

Corps headquarters at, 179, 190, 517, 538, 539, 569, 590

German defense at, 270, 291-292, 361-63, 378-81, 410, 454-56

Highway bridge over Waal-- Market-Garden objective, 123, 135-36, 229,
285-87, 410-13, 442, 496 German defense of, 283, 291, 378-81, 410, 413,
428, 434, 453-56 battle at, 428-33, 443, 468-479

Airborne-Armored link-up at, 411, 438fn.

Waal river crossing, 431-34, 451, 453, 457-69, 476, 480 Nixon, Cpl.
Philip, 421 Noordermeer, Father Tiburtius, 29 Nooy, Menno "Tony" de, 28
Normandy, 30, 31, 70-71, 122, 167, 171, 174, 235-36 North Beveland
island, 197 Norton, Lt. Col. John, 142 Numan, Gijsbert Jan, 161,
206,

Nunan, S/sgt. Paul, 198, 429 Nunn, L/cpl. Sydney, 176, 194-195,
528-29, 582-83

Oakes, Sgt. Bill, 198 O'Brien, Pvt. William, 406, 526 OB West, 30,
32-37, 51, 255, 284fn., see also Rundstedt, Gerd von

Model as, 33, 37, 39, 43, 45-46

Kluge as, 37, 41, 45 O'Cock, Capt. Mick, 169, 170,

O'Connell, 2nd Lieut. Robert,

O'Hagan, Pvt. Pat, 362-63 Oldfather, Cpl. Earl, 362 Oliver, Major
Roy, 541fn. Onck, William, 334 Onderwater, Dr., 512, 523 O'ationeal,
S/sgt. Russell, 175,

Oosterbeek, 116, 168, 336-37, 599

German retreat through, 23-24, 29

Gen. Model's headquarters, 116-117, 143, 145-46, 152, 203, 218-19,
285

resistance groups, 145-46, 395, 396, 522, 523

Allied bombing of, 202-3, 285

Allied landing at, 261, 272

fighting in, 344, 382-88, 395, 396, 441-42, 495-503, 510-17, 521-32,
542-64

civilians, 383-85, 511-13, 522-525, 552, 558-59, 595

airlift resupply failure, 424, 496, 542

evacuation of casualties, 552-60

withdrawal of Airborne, 568-569, 572-91, 595 Oosterbeek Laag church,
341 Oosterhout, 489, 518, 519, 534, 535 Operation Berlin, 571, 573,
578, 580-81, 591 Operation Comet, 82-84, 88, 122, 125 Operation Garden,
11, 112

planning, assignments, 122-23, 128, 168, 170-71

briefing, 164-67

breakout, 245 et seq

schedule, 410, 519

see also Operation Market-Garden Operation Linnet, 127

Operation Market, 11, 112

planning, 121-24, 128-43, 190

takeoff, 187-99

pathfinders, 190, 209, 210, 235, 497, 504, 513, 580, 582

schedule, 363-64

see also Operation Market-Garden Operation Market-Garden, 11-12,
112-15,

inception, 112

planning, preparation, 123, 128-143, 157-59, 172-83, 508-9

assignments, objectives, 134-41,

hazards and cautions, 129-33, 141-42, 157-63, 174-175

briefing, 164-69

gliders, 123, 128, 129, 189-99, 219-25, 234, 241-42, 251, 364-66,
370-71, 417-20, 423, 541, 544

drop zones, landing sites, 134-135

communications problems, 170-171, 179-80, 233-34, 243-44, 257-59, 265,
274-75, 341-42, 388-89, 404, 412, 416-17, 442, 495, 496, 506, 539,
541

weather, 83, 130, 180, 341, 354-355, 364, 408, 452, 487, 507, 509, 533,
542,

takeoff, flight, 187-99

accidents and rescues, 194-99

drops, landings, 211-16, 219-228, 234-39, 338-39

casualties, 216, 365-67, 384, 397, 400-405, 414, 420-427, 432, 435,
448, 483-485, 507, 548, 551, 553-557, 590-93, 599

German guessing on Allied aims, 210, 216-18, 229, 254-255, 280-81,
290-91, 515-16

supply losses, 228, 241-42, 365-368, 376, 418-24, 512, 542, 544

Allied plans found by Germans, 283-85, 354, 369

second lift, 355, 363-77

third lift, 410, 418-24

airborne-armored link-up, 518

news and censorship, 216fn., 540-41

withdrawal of forces, 568-95 Osborne, Major Charles, 499 Oss, 29
Overasselt, 209, 235, 238-40 Overton, Sgt. Leonard, 514, 562-563
Oxfordshire, 187

Pacey, Sgt. Charles W., 472, 474 Paetsch, Lieut. Col., 290, 292,

Palmer, Lieut. John, 357-58 Pannerden, 291-92, 378, 430, 454,

Panzerf@auste, 326, 327, 400 Pare, Chaplain G. A., 191, 408, 419, 548,
563, 593-94, 640 Paris, 63 Parker, Lieut. Russ, 429 Parkes,
L/bombardier Percy, 177, 557, 559-60, 588 Parks, Brig. Gen. Floyd L.,
112 Passchendaele battles, 163fn. Patton, Lt. Gen. George S., 33,
41, 53, 72, 75, 83, 113,

rivalry with Montgomery, 64, 66-69, 71, 74, 85, 113

Rundstedt respect for, 55, 281 Pavey, Gunner Charles, 586 Payton-Reid,
Lt. Col. R., 497, 511-512, 563, 578 Pearce, Signalman Kenneth John,
138, 532-33 Pearson, S/sgt. Dudley, 525-27, 532, 557 Peelen, Jan, 209
Peijnenburg, Henri, 26 Pennings, Jan, 209

Penseel, Johannes, 29, 335 Perry, Capt. Hugh H., 239 Petersburg Hotel,
551 Peterse, Rev. Wilhelmus, 22 Petersen, M/sgt. Emil, 329-30 PGEM
power station, Nijmegen, 206, 244, 458, 462, 467 Phantom (liaison
unit), 179, 243-244, 341, 442, 443, 457, 516, 563, 583 Philips
electrical works, 18-19, 48 Piat, 274, 530, 531 Pieter the ferryman,
336, 337, 371fn., 387, 499-501, 506 Pogue, Dr. Forrest C., 69fn.
Polish 1/ Parachute Brigade, 84, 88, 122, 172, 398-99, 496-99, 559

Market-Garden assignment, 123, 129, 141-42, 183, 389, 391,

takeoff delayed, 410, 417-18, 446,

change in drop zone, 410, 442, 445

landing at Johannahoeve Farm, 423

landing at Driel, 442, 445, 501-507, 515, 517

Rhine crossing, 535-37, 543, 564, 570, 577

survivors, 591 Poppe, Maj. Gen. Walter, 115, 252 Powell, Maj. George
S., 138, 420, 532, 578-79, 585 Preston, Lt. Col. P. H., 339,

Pritchard, Pvt. Thomas, 406

Queripel, Capt. L. E., 441 Quinan, Lieut. Barry, 169-70, 247

Radio Orange, 25, 27, 202 Rastenburg, East Prussia, 30, 33 Rate, Sgt.
John, 137 Raub, Pvt. Edwin C., 237 Rauh, Pvt. Wilhelm, 232 Rauter, SS
Lt. Gen. Hans Albin,

Read, Signalman Victor, 177 Red Ball Express, 70 Red Cross, 504, 523,
525, 550, 552, 553, 556, 581, 594 Red Devil, see 1/ Airborne, under
British Army units, Divisions Reichswald, 135, 235, 285, 362, 453, 572
Reinhard, Col., 217-18 Renfro, Lt. Col. Curtis D., 166 Renkum, 25,
145, 209, 230, 231, 243, 339

airlanding at, 225, 226, 422 Ressen, 489 Reyers-Camp, Holland, 369
Richmond, Sgt. Leroy, 467 Ricketts, James, 422fn. Ridgway, Lt. Gen.
Matthew B., 125-27, 478 Rigby-Jones, Major Guy, 551, 593 Ringsdorf, SS
Squad Ldr. Alfred, 326-28 Roberts, Maj. Gen. George Philip,

Roberts, Capt. Hugh, 427 Robinson, Sgt. Peter, 471-72, 474-475, 477,
479 Robinson, Sgt. Major "Robbo," 589 Roermond, 26 Roelofs, Theodorus,
209 Rommel, Field Marshal Erwin, 31, 42, 43, 148 Rotterdam, 25, 26, 28,
38 Roullier, Sgt. Alfred, 177-78, 561-562, 586-87 Rowbotham, Arthur,
422fn. Royal Air Force (r.a.f.), 139, 179fn., 187, 227, 281, 357, 380,
451

reconnaissance, 133, 159, 275fn.

glider-tug operation, 222, 423

communications, 171, 179fn., 248

resupply and fighter support, 496, 533, 542 Royal Palace Garden,
Laeken, 63

Royal Restaurant, Arnhem,

Ruhr--

German guessing on Allied aims on, 41, 53-54, 151, 254, 284, 290-91,
380

Montgomery's aim toward, 64, 73, 88-89, 123, 255, 442, 541,

Eisenhower's policy on, 72, 78 Rundstedt, Field Marshal Gerd von--

as OB West, 30-39, 41-43, 45, 51-59, 255-56, 281, 378

and Hitler, 30-37, 41-42, 45, 52, 53, 59

anti-Hitler plot, 42, 43fn.

rehabilitation of army, 39, 52-59, 114-15, 255-56, 378, 395,

speculation on Allied attack, 151, 152, 201

reaction to Market-Garden, 281, 282,

Ruppe, Cpl. Frank, 362 Russell, Lieut. Cyril, 247 Ruurlo, 116, 290
Ryan, Cornelius, 363fn.

Saar, 41, 53-55, 64, 68, 72, 73, 78, 85, 113, 281 St. Canisius
Hospital, Nijmegen, 25 St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Arnhem, 25, 332, 335,
344, 347, 384, 390, 402, 403, 406, 409,

Ste. M`ere @eglise, 235 St. Eusebius, Church of (grote Kerk), 24,
205, 323, 353 St. Oedenrode, 19, 25, 134, 251, 359, 566, 568
Samuelson, Lieut. Tony, 489 Sande, Truid van der, 333, 353 Sande
family, 353 Sanderbobrorg, Dr., 423 Saunders, Hilary St. George,
352fn. Schaap, Lambert, 352-53 Schelde estuary, 44, 58, 115, 452
Schoonoord Hotel, 513, 593, 594

conversion into hospital, 384, 511, 522-23, 547-48, 555, 563

truce for casualty evacuation, 553, 558 Schouwen Island, 197, 199, 365
Schulte, Agatha, 23 Schulte, Frans, 30 Schulte, Hendrina, 23 Schultz,
Pvt. Arthur "Dutch," 363 Schwalbe, Gen. Eugene Felix, 452fn. Scott,
Pvt. Joe, 369 Screaming Eagles, see 101/ Airborne, under United States
Army Divisions Seccombe, Capt. Ernest, 403 Sedelhauser, Lieut.
Gustav, 116-117, 210, 218, 219, 284-285 Seine river, 71-72
Seyss-Inquart, Dr. Arthur, 19, 20 SHAEF, 27, 63, 68, 74, 75, 76fn.,
77, 81, 157, 158, 162-163, 335; see also Eisenhower, Dwight D.
Shearwood, Pvt. Arthur, 589 s'Hertogenbosch, 222, 365 Shulman, 2nd
Lieut. Herbert E., 214 Shulman, Milton, 50fn., 214fn. Sicily, 135
Siegfried Line (westwall), 36, 37, 41, 43, 44, 52, 53, 69, 70, 72, 77,
88, 123 Siely, Sgt. Major John, 177-78 Sievers, Lt. Gen. Karl, 49
Simpson, Lieut. Dennis, 228, 480, 482fn. Simpson, R.a.f. Sgt.
Walter, 195, 422 Sims, Lieut. E. J., 467 Sims, Pvt. James W., 137,
227, 277, 435, 450, 483-86 Sink, Col. Robert F., 215, 252, 289, 359
Skalka, Major Egon, 553-56, 559 Smaczny, Lieut. Albert, 417

Smith, Maj. Gen. Edward Hakewill,

Smith, Lieut. J. J., 431 Smith, Guardsman Tim, 170 Smith, Lt. Gen.
Walter Bedell, 63, 66, 77, 113, 157-59, 162-63 Sm@ockel, Major Horst,
145 Smyth, Lt. Col. Ken, 523-25 Smythe, Jack, 541fn. Snoek,
Johannes, 25 Son, 253, 364, 411, 426, 452,

highway bridge at, 134, 252, 289, 356, 358, 359-61, 363, 453

Bailey bridge built, 410, 425

glider landings at, 216, 366 Sosabowski, Maj. Gen. Stanislaw, 515,
520, 521, 535-37, 640

Market-Garden assignment, 123, 141-42, 389, 398-99, 416-18, 445-46,
496, 515

misgivings, 141-42, 416-18, 451,

takeoff, landing, 424, 450-51, 498-99,

Rhine crossing, 506-7, 520, 536-537, 542-43 South Beveland, 44-45, 55,
58, 60 Spanhoe airfield, 176 Speedie, Willie, 579 Spicer, L/cpl.
Gordon, 177, 447 Spivey, Sgt. Horace "Hocker," 180 Spratt, Sgt. Jack,
437, 439 Stainforth, Lieut. Peter, 228, 435, 438, 560 Stanners, Cpl.
Geoffrey, 177, 227 Stauffenberg, Col. Claus Graf von, 42 Stefanich,
Capt. Anthony, 363 Steinfort, Johannes, 27 Stephenson, Lt. Col. Tom,
179 Steveninck, Col. Albert "Steve" de Ruyter van, 167-68 Stevens, Lt.
Col. George, 418, 445-446, 502 Stewart, Major Richard, 515 Stoke
Rochford, Lincolnshire, 183 Storey, Sgt. Charles, 351 Strong, Maj.
Gen. Kenneth W., 157 Stranzky, Sister Antonia, 25 Student, Col. Gen.
Kurt, 156fn., 163, 242, 252, 281, 378, 379

at Albert Canal line 49-51, 147

heads First Parachute Army, 38, 50,

reaction to Market planes, 200, 217-18, 229

Market-Garden plans, 254-55, 283 Sullivan, Sgt. Stanley, 580, 590
Sunley, Sgt. Joe, 181 Sutherland, Squadron Ldr. Max, 171, 248, 488-90
Sweeney, Capt. Neil, 189 Swiecicki, Marek, 541fn. Swift, Sgt.
Norman, 226-27 Symons, Sister M. Dosith@ee, 25

Tafelberg Hotel, Oosterbeek, 116,

Model's headquarters, 117, 145-147, 152, 154, 201, 210, 218-19,

as hospital, 384, 522, 551, 552, 555-57, 559 Tasker, Lt. Col.
Anthony, 162 Tatham-Warter, Major Digby, 269, 271, 436-37, 439, 558fn.
Taylor, Lt. Col. George, 519, 520, 535-37 Taylor, Maj. Gen. Maxwell
D., 251, 252, 360, 361, 366, 368, 541, 640

assignment in Market-Garden, 123, 130, 134-36, 599

airlanding, 216

combat action, 411, 424, 444, 533, 534, 572

and Dutch underground, 444, 534 Taylor, Capt. William, 347, 348,

Tedder, Marshal Sir Arthur, 74, 77,

Tempelhof, Col. Hans von. 210, 218, 281fn.

Terborg, 283 ter Horst, Jan, 386-88, 549, 639 ter Horst, Mrs., 371fn.,
548-50, 560-61, 594, 639 Tettau, Lt. Gen. Hans von. 291, 338, 339
Thomas, Cpl. D., 196 Thomas, Maj. Gen. G. Ivor, 478, 491, 539, 542,
543, 564, 568, 570, 571, 573, 577, 590 Thompson, Lieut. John S.,
239-40 Thompson, R. W., 60fn. Thompson, Lt. Col. W. F. K. "Sheriff,"
339, 341, 352, 383, 497-98, 588 Tiemans, Willem, 22 Tilburg, 48, 252
Tilly, Lt. Col. Gerald, 564,

Toler, Major Thomas, 579 Tomblin, Sgt. Pilot Bryan, 222 Tompson,
FirstSgt. William, 196,

Torrant Rushton, 417 Travis-Davison, Sgt. Pilot Kenneth,

Tremble, Pvt. Leonard G., 463 Tromp family in Heelsum, 261 Trotter,
Major John, 471 Traux, Pvt. Kenneth, 198 Tucker, Sgt. Bill, 198
Tucker, Col. Reuben H., 238, 240, 432-33, 457, 458, 468, 477,

Turner, L/cpl. Arthur, 404, 405fn. Tyler, Major Edward G., 169, 250,
358-59, 458, 459, 467

Uden, 19, 165, 534 Uijen, Albertus, 206 Unck, Nicholaas, 205 United
States Army, 55, 83

Army groups 12th Army Group, 64, 65, 72

Armies First Army, 33, 51, 64, 68, 71, 84, 202, 378 Third Army, 33, 41,
53, 64, 67-69, 71, 281, 378; see also Patton, George S.

Army Corps Air Corps, 199 XVIII Airborne Corps, 125

Divisions 82nd Airborne, 88, 172, 174-175, 429, 542; Market-Garden
assignment, 123, 128, 135; Market takeoff and flight, 190, 194, 197-99;
landing and drop, 209, 234-43, 285-287; and Dutch resistance groups,
335; communications, 335; combat actions, 234-43, 285-87, 361-68, 413,
428-33, 453, 459-77, 637; amphibious assault across Waal, 431-32,
459-67, 637; resupply lifts and losses, 365-68, 418-19, 541; link-up
with ground forces, 411, 438fn.; casualties, 432, 599 101/ Airborne,
172, 196; Market-Garden assignment, 123, 128; Market takeoff and
flight, 190, 197, 211-16; landings and drops, 210, 216-17, 251-53;
link-up with Garden units, 244-45, 356-60, 411; resupply lifts and
losses, 365-68, 418, 541; casualties, 425-427, 599; and Dutch
resistance, 251, 444; combat actions, 251-53, 360-361, 366-68, 424-27,
453, 533-34, 637; repair of bridge at Son, 289, 356, 359

Miscellaneous IX Troop Carrier Command, 129, 190, 213, 216 325th Glider
Infantry Regiment, 419, 451, 453, 459, 469, 470, 541

Urquhart, Major Brian, 131-33,

Urquhart, Maj. Gen. Robert E. "Roy," 9, 131, 533, 599

Market-Garden assignment, 123, 136-38

Market-Garden planning, 130, 139-143, 163, 179-82, 189, 192, 275fn.,
444

command succession, 192, 339-342, 375, 376, 388, 394

takeoff and landing, 189, 191, 195, 197, 226, 228

march to Arnhem bridge, 257

communications failure, 178-80, 233, 258, 268, 340, 341, 389,

separation from hq., 258-60, 266-68, 272, 276, 339, 343-49, 376-77,
407-9

rumor of his death, 411

combat action, 343-47, 365, 407-10, 412, 416, 419, 440-46, 451, 457,
479, 486, 495-501, 515, 544, 546-47,

Polish reinforcements, 416, 419, 451, 498-99, 501, 506-7, 515-16,
520-21, 535

Dutch resistance groups, 444

appeals for help, 496, 500-01, 507, 516, 517, 519-21, 533-34, 539, 540,
544, 563-64, 573

evacuation of wounded, 553, 559

combat withdrawal, 566-86, 590-91 Utrecht, 281

V-2's, 84 Valkenswaard, 18, 25, 165, 251, 281, 355, 356 Valkhof,
Nijmegen, 430, 468-70 Vandeleur, Lt. Col. Giles, 167, 169, 246, 250,
458-60, 462, 463, 487-91 Vandeleur, Lt. Col. J.o.e. ("Joe"), 164,
167, 169, 171, 246-249, 356-358, 487-91 Vandervoort, Lt. Col. Ben,
236, 428-30, 456, 468-70, 472 Veghel, 19, 134, 165, 251, 452, 533, 534,
543, 569 Velp, 290 Venlo, 26 Victoria Cross, 324fn., 421, 441 Visser,
Cornelis de, 19 Vlasto, Lieut. Robin, 227, 260,

Vlist, Hendrika van der, 511, 522-523, 548, 558-59, 593,

Voskuil, Bertha, 23, 203, 524-25,

Voskuil, Henri, 524-25 Voskuil, Jan, 23-24, 203, 261-62, 383, 512-13,
523-25 Vreewijk Hotel, 384 Vroemen, Lucianus, 24 Vught, 200, 254
Vuletich, S/sgt. Michael, 237

Waal river, 16, 89, 515, 519, 520

Nijmegen bridge over-- Market-Garden objective, 123, 135, 285 German
defense of, 283, 350, 379, 381, 410, 453, 456,

battle for, 428-31, 453, 455, 466-79, 572

amphibious assault across, 431-433, 453, 456-67, 476-477, 543 Waddy,
Major John L., 369, 551,

Waddy, Major Peter, 345 Waffen SS, 18, 148, 268, 329 Wageningen, 21,
422 Walburg Church, 334 Walch, Brig. Gordon, 125, 163, 242, 244, 433,
538, 540, 566 Walcheren Island, 44, 58, 115, 197 Walton, Brig. Ben,
566, 567 Wannsee, Berlin, 37 Warlimont, Gen. Walter, 33 Warr, Major
Peter, 523-25 Warrack, Dr. Graeme, 551-57, 559, 577-78 Warren, Dr.
John C., 365fn., 591fn. Warren, Lt. Col. Shields, Jr.,

Warrender, Pvt. A. G., 191 Warsaw, 281 Watkins, S/sgt. Bert, 198
Weber, Pvt. Horst, 434 Weerd, Nicolas van de, 21 Weert, 48 Weiss,
Capt. Edward, 390 Wellems, Major Edward, 175-76, 238,

Weller, Lieut. Millford F., 253 Welschap airfield, Eindhoven, 208
Wely, Paul van, 21 Wesel, 82, 84 Westerbouwing, 385-88, 497, 499
Westphal, Gen. Siegfried, 53 Westwall, see Siegfried Line White,
Sapper Pinky, 401, 415 Wicks, 182, 450, 583 Wienecke, Col. Robert H.,
135 Wierzbowski, Lieut. Edward L., 360-61, 425 Wiessing, Frans, 21
Wijburg, Hendrik, 204 Wilcox, Lieut. David, 520, 535 Wildeboer, Bill,
28 Wilhelmina, Queen, 20, 61, 509-510 Wilhelmina Canal, 134, 252,
359,

Williams, S/sgt., 224 Williams, FirstLieut. Billy, 541fn. Williams,
Maj. Gen. Paul L., 129 Willems Canal, 134, 251 Willingham, Pvt.
Albert, 524 Wilmot, Chester, 412fn., 519fn., 541fn. Wilson, Major Boy,
497, 513, 582 Winecup, 170, 490 Wit, Adriana de, 208 Wit, Gerardus de,
207-8 Wit, Karel de, 29 Wolfheze, 28, 522

landing and drop zones at, 140, 143, 218, 222, 391, 409

mental hospital at, 28, 192, 204, 225

Allied bombing of, 202-4

Panzer Grenadier base at, 230-232

battle at, 263-66, 276, 369, 441

resistance groups, 395 Wolfheze Hotel, 230 Wolfheze Psychiatric
Institute, 28, 192, 204, 225 Wolfsschanze ("Wolf's Lair"), 33 Wolters,
Lt. Couldr. Arnoldus, 182, 396, 444-45, 522, 553-556, 583-85, 589,
640, Wood, Alan, 541fn. Woods, Lieut. James, 547 Wright, Pvt. Harry,
226 Wrottesley, Capt. Lord Richard, 517-18, 521, 538 Wurst, Sgt.
Spencer, 469-70 Wyler, Germany, 242, 362 Wyllie, L/cpl. George,
523-24

Young, S/sgt. Alec, 371 Young, Lieut. Arthur, 518, 521

Zangen, Gen. Gustav von, 44-45, 58, 114, 115, 452 Zapalski, 1/ Sgt.
Daniel, 173 Zeelst, 207, 208 Zetten, 21 Zimmermann, Lt. Gen. Bodo,
45fn.,

Zuid Willemsvaart Canal, 19 Zutphen, 116 Zweden, Johan van, 24
Zwolanski, Capt., 507