Armageddon - Max Hastings [45]
Far back down the road from Nijmegen to the start line, “Hell’s Highway” as Americans had begun to call it, traffic jams held up progress for hours. An unfounded belief that the Germans had mined the road verges confined every British vehicle to the tarmac. Some stretches of the route lay silent and empty for long periods because of jams further back. A great column of smoke drifted across the highway near Son, where a lorryload of smoke grenades had caught fire. By now, every man committed to the battle was desperately tired. A British tank commander, Corporal Andy Cropper, was disconcerted to find that his Sherman driver had fallen asleep as they advanced. Fortunately the driver’s hatch was open. Cropper was able to clamber down the hull and shake the man awake before they crashed.
The road that lay ahead from Nijmegen to Arnhem was straight and steeply embanked, enabling German defenders to fire upon advancing British tanks as if these were being presented to them on a rifle range. Yet bolder and more imaginative soldiers—Germans, for instance—in these circumstances would have pushed on towards Arnhem through the darkness, risking everything for a great coup. It reflected poorly upon the British Army that it was unable to mount the next phase of its advance from Nijmegen for eighteen hours after the Waal bridges were secured. By the time the Irish Guards resumed the advance at 1100 on 21 September, men of 10th SS Panzer were ready to give them a hot reception. The last stage of the Allied advance towards the Rhine, whose only purpose was now the rescue of 1st Airborne’s survivors, was as messy and botched as everything else about Market Garden.
On the evening of 20 September, the organized defence of the north end of Arnhem bridge by 1st Airborne Division came to an end, when the survivors of Frost’s force surrendered. Other British paratroopers endured six more days of savage fighting, clinging to their shrinking perimeter at Oosterbeek, three miles from Frost’s lost positions. The hapless Polish Brigade was parachuted on to the Rhine shore amid devastating German fire, at a moment when all chance of success was gone. The Poles retained a lasting, justified bitterness about their sacrifice. After 20 September, the heroism of 1st Airborne’s survivors had become strategically irrelevant. All chance of seizing and exploiting a Rhine crossing was gone. The Germans held Arnhem in strength, and would do so almost until the end of the war. The resistance sustained by 1st Airborne’s survivors at Oosterbeek until 26 September was the stuff of legend, but offered only a chance of escape for the survivors, rather than serving any higher military purpose.
Throughout the Market Garden battle, American paratroopers and British soldiers of XXX Corps were fighting bitter little actions along the entire length of the corridor northwards. “One of the worst sights for me,” said John Thorpe of the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, “was coming upon Guards Armoured men hanging out of burning tanks, and a shell-blasted transport vehicle with its occupants all dead and lying about with their clothes stripped from their bodies except their boots.”
The same day, George Turner-Cain wrote in his diary: “Very bitter fighting, and getting more so each time we meet. We never fail to defeat the Hun, and his casualties are out of all proportion to our own, but still he fights on