Armageddon - Max Hastings [44]
Gavin’s assault boats were delayed everywhere along the jammed road to Nijmegen, not least by a Luftwaffe raid on Eindhoven. They finally arrived at the river bank at 1440 on the afternoon of 20 September, twenty minutes before the chosen H-hour. The preliminary Allied bombardment had already begun. Under intense machine-gun and mortar fire, the first wave of 260 men of twenty-seven-year-old Major Julian Cook’s 3/504th plunged into the water, and began frantically to paddle across the Waal, in a boat race with death. Some of the clumsy craft were blown out of the water. Others floundered, holed and sinking. A brisk wind blew away a protective smokescreen laid by the tank gunners. As the first Americans struggled up the far bank, Browning said to Horrocks: “I have never seen a more gallant action.” Germans who belatedly sought to surrender were cut down ruthlessly by paratroopers enraged by their terrible losses. Only half the twenty-six canvas boats that carried the first wave were fit to return and bring over the second.
By 1700, the Waal rail bridge was in American hands. On the south bank, a new Anglo-American assault at last cracked open the German defence and pressed forward to the highway bridge. Guards tanks began to cross, machine-gunning German engineers clinging to the girders and destroying an 88mm gun on the far side. As the leading Shermans rumbled on to the roadway on the north side, surviving U.S. paratroopers from the boat crossing emerged to greet them. A lone Royal Engineer officer ran after the tanks across the bridge, cutting demolition wires wherever he could see them. The mystery will never be resolved of whether the Germans failed to detonate the charges, or whether they lost the electrical means to do so. It was 1915 on 20 September. The Allies stood eleven miles from the bridge at Arnhem. The paratroopers who had paddled across the Waal had paid with losses of over 50 per cent—134 men killed, wounded or missing. The achievement of the 82nd and 101st Airborne was superb. They displayed a dash, initiative, skill and determination which, had it been repeated elsewhere in the Allied armies during the autumn and winter of 1944, would have finished the war by Christmas.
The Americans who paid so dearly for the bridge at Nijmegen were now bewildered and disgusted to behold the British armour halt on the north bank of the Waal, harbour for the night and begin to brew tea. The British said they had to wait for supporting infantry, that it was madness for tanks to advance into darkness. The Americans expostulated that after all the delays and sacrifices of the day it was time to throw away the rulebook and risk everything to reach 1st Airborne. Gavin wrote: “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.” Ridgway himself, that very afternoon, was in a towering rage after encountering a hold-up in his jeep between Son and the 101st CP. A young British Guards officer told the American that his unit had halted because of enemy fire. The general sat fuming for forty minutes without hearing a shot in the vicinity, nor any sign of energetic British activity. Finally, the corps commander abandoned his jeep and walked a mile and a half to Taylor’s CP, without meeting fire. He later described himself as “much dissatisfied with the apathy and lack of aggressiveness of the British forces,” a view shared by some British officers.
The vital infantry of 43rd (Wessex) Division, following up Guards Armoured, had not yet reached Grave, eight