THE GERMANS had been caught by surprise but were waking up. They got units to the various bridges to defend them or blow them if necessary. The GIs started taking casualties.
As the troopers moved towards their objectives, gliders bearing soldiers and equipment began coming into the DZs. One crash-landed on the edge of a wooded area and was under German small-arms fire coming from the tree line. Captain Anthony Stefanich (Captain Stef to the men) called out to Sergeant Schultz and others to follow him, and headed towards the German position.
Stefanich was one of those officers brought up by General Gavin. Schultz remembered Stefanich as a man “who led through example rather than virtue of rank. He was what I wanted to be when I finally grew up.”
Stefanich got hit in the upper torso by rifle fire, which set afire a smoke grenade he was carrying. Lieutenant Gerald Johnson jumped on him to put the fire out, then carried the wounded captain back to where an aid station had been set up.
But it was too late. Just before he died, Stefanich whispered to Lieutenant Johnson, “We have come a long way-tell the boys to do a good job.” The medic, a Polish boy from Chicago, stood up beside the body. He was crying and calling out, “He’s gone, he’s gone. I couldn’t help him.” It was, Schultz said, “a devastating loss. It was the only time in combat that I broke down and wept.”
BY THE END of September 17 the Americans had achieved most of their objectives. The British 1st Airborne, meanwhile, had landed north of Arnhem and secured the area for reinforcements to come in the next day. One battalion, led by Colonel John Frost, went into Arnhem and took the east end of the bridge. The British Second Army failed to reach its objectives but had made progress.
On September 18, however, almost everything went wrong. German 88s, assembled in woods on either side of the raised road the British were using, began firing with devastating effectiveness. It was easy shooting, looking up at the tanks against the skyline. Soon disabled vehicles blocked the road, causing gigantic traffic jams. The weather in England turned bad-rain, fog, mist-grounding all aeroplanes. There would be no reinforcements, no supply drops.
Over the Continent the weather was good enough for the Jabos to fly. Colonel Cole, commanding the 3rd Battalion of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, got on the radio. A pilot asked him to put orange identification panels in front of his position. As Cole was placing the panels on the ground, a German sniper shot and killed him. Two weeks later the army awarded him the Medal of Honour for his bayonet charge near Carentan on June 11. His widow accepted his posthumous award on the parade ground at Fort Sam Houston, where Cole had played as a child. In Mrs Cole’s arms was the eighteen-month-old son Cole had never seen.
ON SEPTEMBER 19 the British Second Army struggled forward, linking up with the 82nd outside Nijmegen. In Arnhem, Colonel Frost held his isolated position at the bridge, but his situation was desperate. He was going into a third day with most of his battalion wounded (as was he), under attack from German tanks, with nothing but small arms to fight back with, out of food and medicine.
To get to Frost, the Guards Armoured Division had to get across the Waal River. Before that could happen, Gavin had to take the railroad and highway bridges at Nijmegen. The 82nd had taken much of the city, but the bridges were still well defended.
Lieutenant Waverly Wray-the man who had killed ten Germans with a single shot each on June 7 at Ste. Mere-Eglise-led an assault on the railway bridge. “The last I saw of him,” one trooper reported, “he was headed for the Germans with a grenade in one hand and a tommy gun in the other.” As Wray raised his head over the track embankment, a German sniper firing from a signal tower killed him with a single shot in the middle of his head.
ON THAT afternoon Gavin met with British Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, commanding the Guards Armoured Division. Horrocks said he could provide tank support for an attack on the bridges, and he could have trucks bring forward assault boats for a crossing of the river downstream from the bridges. Gavin decided to hit the western ends with Lieutenant Colonel Ben Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion, 505th PIR, and to give the task of crossing the river in boats to Major Julian Cook’s 3rd Battalion, 504th PIR.