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General Urquhart, among the first in, had gone up with the advance against the bridge. His jeep had been found later—a dead man at its wheel. The General had gone on with two officers to reconnoiter the bridge, had been cornered in a house commanded by a German big gun, 100 yds. away. A rescue force had found them, had got them out to fight their way back to the beech woods, and field headquarters in a onetime hotel.
John Bull. When word came at last that the British Second Army had worked up to the south bank of the Lek across from Arnhem, and that rescue (but not relief) was a possibility, Urquhart radioed: "All will be ordered to break out rather than surrender. We have attempted our best and we will continue to do our best as long as possible."
The story of escape was told by Alan Wood, correspondent of the London Daily Express, who had dropped with the First Airborne:
"We split up into little groups of ten to 20, setting out [at night] along different routes through the German lines. . . . We tore up blankets and wrapped them around our boots to muffle the sound of our feet, and chose the password, 'John Bull.' . . . Everyone held to the smock of the man in front of him. . . . Cheeky patrols went out ahead of us, tying bits of white parachute tape to the trees to mark our way. . . . We all got through [to the river]."
There was a long wait on the river bank in a drizzling rain, lighted now & then by mortars and shellfire. Finally, the little rubber boats came. Continued Alan Wood: "The men whose turn for a place in the boats had come . . . insisted on staying under fire a little longer so that the wounded could go first. And so this epic ended as it had been fought—with honor, with high courage, with selfless sacrifice. What of the spirit of these men? . . . You can best judge it by the name they chose for the breakout. It had the same objective they always have had. . . . They called it 'Operation Berlin.' "
"All Is Well." But many who reached the river did not cross it: at dawn the enemy spotted the men along the sloping bank, turned their weapons against them again. One who did not cross was General Urquhart. Wounded, he fought with his bare fists until captured. Later that day he somehow escaped from the Germans.
To him Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery signaled: "There can be few episodes more glorious." The Red Devils, taking it until flesh & blood could stand no more, had been defeated, but their long gamble for a short cut to the war's end had not been without gains. Their stand had helped immeasurably in the victory at the Nijmegen bridge by preventing reinforcement of the German forces there.
* P.I.A.T. — Projector, Infantry, Antitank., a mortar-type weapon often erroneously likened to the U.S. rocket-firing bazooka.