"A
Bridge Too Far"
Photos: St. Elizabeth Hospital, where hundreds of the wounded were taken; the Airborne cemetery, British and Polish dead; two angles of the John Frost Bridge, as it is now named. It is the bridge over Arnhem, and it is the "bridge too far".
For many years we had planned to go to Arnhem to see the bridges and study the roads that lead to that famous WWII military failure of September 17-24,1944, written by Cornelius Ryan and made into a movie in 1977. Jack loves military history, and by process of osmosis, so do I. We started watching that movie years ago, and I must say, I was very confused those first few times, because one needs to know the geography of the place in order to understand what they were trying to do and why they failed so miserably.
I used to drag my atlas out and find the places where the bridges were located while I watched the movie. It began to make sense, and we said one day we would go there and follow the road across the four bridges.
So, day finally arrived where we could follow the action, and we were ready to explore the story. The interesting thing was that by some weird coincidence, we chose a hotel that was located in the middle of a lot of the action of the book/movie. The NH Rijnhotel is located right on the Rhine river. Our hotel room was lovely, and it had a balcony overlooking the river and the land across it, just used for grazing land to this day. We found out as we explored the story that we were just down from the St. Elizabeth's hospital, where so many of the wonded were brought; we were actually on the road where Frost's battalion marched to the Arnhem bridge and we were just steps away from the house where Urquhardt was holed up for more than a day, surrounded by German soldiers down in the streets, looking for him.
But I get ahead of myself. I must give a summary of the book/movie in order to get a clear picture of what we wanted to visit here in Arnhem.
It was summer of 1944; D-Day was a huge success but Allied armies were struggling to get across to Germany because their supplies had to be brought in by boat near the channel and brought over land, which took many days. Montgomery wanted to jump start the operation of getting into Germany, so he devised this huge plan to drop thousands of allied paratroopers and soldiers in Holland, then cross the Rhine at Arnhem, Holland, right on the German border, and forge into the industrial heart of Germany to cripple them - and get the boys home by Christmas.
"Monty", the British commander, was dying for some extensive plan to exceed D-Day. Eisenhower bought his plan to jump start something in Europe, rather than watch the slow movement of the troops through Belgium, so in the space of a few days a huge project was underway.
Market Garden
This plan called for thousands of paratroopers to be dropped behind enemy lines in Holland, have them capture the bridges south to north, from Eindhoven to Arnhem, and then the British infantry could march up the road to Arnhem, taking the ground and marching into Germany where the Rhine River marks the boundary of Holland and Germany right at Arnhem. There were reports from Dutch underground that the German army was in tatters; they were retreating back to Germany. There would be little resistance from them as the British and American armies took this part of Holland away from German occupation.
The plan was very intricate; everything had to go exactly as designed or there would be disaster. The more complicated the plan, the more room for error. And, as it unfolded, nothing really went as planned and therefore it was a huge disaster. First, the Germans had coincidentally chosen Arnhem to be the resting place for several of their Panzer divisions; the weather played havoc with the schedule, and the drop zones had to be so far away from the bridges that it took away the element of surprise for the Allies.
The British airborne was dropped west of Arnhem and had to walk about three or four miles east to get to the Arnhem bridge. They were supposed to secure the bridge and wait a short time for more troops, more ammunition and more supplies soon, at most just forty-eight hours. It turned out that they got none of the support, and after a heroic struggle of four nights and three days, after constant bombardment from the Germans, they had to give up and be taken prisoner.
Because Holland is so water soaked, the drop zones of men, jeeps, tanks and supplies had to be miles from where they were needed. Everything was confusion from the beginning. There were so many men and equipment needed for the project that the drops had to be spread out over three days. The weather in England was miserable - too much fog - so the drops continued to be delayed. By the time the supplies were dropped in Holland, the Germans had overrun the zones, so the British got no ammunition, no supplies, no food.
After almost a week of fighting, the British decided to abandon the plan and to retreat back across the Rhine. Browning, the man in charge and deputy to Montgomery, said to Urquhardt back in England that he always thought the plan called for a bridge too far.
The Germans had regrouped as soon as they saw what was happening, so instead of "old men and boys" defending the German line, there were seasoned soldiers who pounded away at the Allies on all sides. The German generals quickly ordered more and more troops, ammunitions and equipment back to Arnhem. The Dutch underground found out about these reinforcements and reported them to the British, but they were ignored. The Dutch also tried to tell them about the narrow roads that the Brits had chosen for the pathway to Arnhem, but again the British ignored them and went ahead anyway with their plan.
The only thing going for the Allies is that the German general, Model, refused to blow up the bridges, because he said they needed them for their "counterattack". Only the Son bridge was blown up. Unfortunately, that bridge was the first one to be used by the British infantry. It took thirty-six hours to rebuild it before any movement north could happen.
The bottom line is that Market Garden failed miserably and the men finally had to give up and retreat from Holland. It was a disaster for the Dutch, because the Germans completely destroyed their town and ordered them to evacuate the entire area. The Dutch suffered greatly for being the focal point of this Allied effort to defeat the Germans, at least for the time being.
The area all around Arnhem still remembers the great effort of the Allies to liberate them from the Germans. They renamed the Arnhem bridge the "John Frost Bridge", and they have a museum at the site. They have the airborne museum west of Arnhem, in Oosterbeek, about five miles west of Arnhem, where the Allies set up their headquarters. They have the airborne cemetery not far away from the museum to honor those who lost their lives trying to liberate them. Every year they have a march to the Arnhem bridge to honor the march of the Allies to capture the bridge.
They also have a museum some ten miles south of Arnhem, at Nijmegen, where the American paratroopers captured and held that bridge so the British infantry could march into Arnhem. We visited the Nijmegen bridge also, where the soldiers had to row across the mighty Waal river to take both sides of the bridge in order to secure it. Many men were lost in that battle also, mostly American.
We had always wondered how accurate the movie was and we found out it followed the story very carefully. The film was full of movie stars, but it turned out that those stars actually resembled the characters they were portraying: Sean Connery, Dirk Bogarde, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, Maximillan Schell and Liv Ullman. Also, the movie either filmed right on the bridges, or found similar ones. The Allied headquarters in Oosterbeek, the hotel Hartensein, looked exactly the same, with the surrounding woods where more and more wounded were laid.
Jack said the book/movie should have been named "Too Far to the Bridge". The soggy ground of the Dutch countryside, laced with canals and rivers, just could not sustain the amount of men and equipment to get them close enough to the bridges, so they had to be dropped miles away and, therefore, gave the Germans the time they needed to regroup.
Our experience was quite sobering yet interesting that an event more than sixty years ago is still upermost in the history of the area. The Dutch still remember the enormous effort the Allies made to liberate them, and they still, to this day, commemorate that effort.
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