In the last hours of Monday, Frost’s hopes hinged on the third lift and the expected arrival of Major General Stanislaw Sosabow-ski’s 1st Polish Parachute Brigade. “They were to drop south of the bridge,” Frost later wrote, “and I dreaded the reception they would have … but it was important that they find a handful of friends to meet them.” To prepare for the Poles’ arrival, Frost organized a “mobile storming party.” Using two of Major Freddie Gough’s armored reconnaissance jeeps and a Bren-gun carrier, Frost hoped to rush across the bridge and, in the surprise and confusion of the assault, open a passage and bring the Poles through. Major Gough, who was to lead the group, was “thoroughly miserable and quite unenthusiastic about the idea.” He had celebrated his forty-third birthday on September 16. If Frost’s plan was carried out, Gough felt quite certain he would not see his forty-fourth.*
The Poles were not expected to land before 10 A.M., on the nineteenth. Now, making his rounds of men in slit trenches, machine-gun emplacements, basements and cellars, Frost warned them to save precious ammunition. They were to fire only at close quarters, to make every shot count. Signalman James Haysom was sighting his rifle on a German when the Colonel’s order was passed along. “Stand still, you sod,” Haysom shouted. “These bullets cost money.”
While Frost knew that reducing the rate of fire would help the enemy improve his positions, he also believed that the Germans would be misled into thinking the British had lost heart as well as numbers. This attitude, Frost was certain, would cost the Germans dearly.
On the opposite side of the ramp, the little band of men with Captain Eric Mackay was already proving Frost’s theory.
In the scarred and pitted schoolhouse under the ramp, Mackay had compressed his small force into two rooms and posted a handful of men in the hall outside to ward off any enemy attempt at infiltration. Mackay had barely positioned his men when the Germans launched a murderous machine-gun and mortar attack. Lance Corporal Arthur Hendy remembers the firing was so intense that bullets “whizzed through the shattered windows, chopped up the floorboards and we dodged as many flying splinters as we did actual bullets.”
As men ducked for cover, Mackay discovered that the Germans had brought up a flamethrower, and within minutes a demolished half-track near the school was set afire. Then, Mackay recalls, “the Germans set fire to the house to our north and it burned merrily, sending down showers of sparks on our wooden roof which promptly caught fire.” In the pandemonium, men sprinted for the roof, where for over three hours, using fire extinguishers from the school and their own camouflage smocks, they worked frantically to extinguish the flames. To Lance Corporal Hendy the stench was “like burning cheese and burning flesh. The whole area was lit up. The heat in the attic was intense and all the time the Germans were sniping away at us. Finally the fire was put out.”
As the exhausted troopers collected once again in the two rooms, Mackay ordered his soldiers to bind their feet with their smocks and shirts. “The stone floors were thick with glass, plaster and metal fragments and the stairs were slippery with blood. Everything scrunched under our feet and made a terrific racket.” As Mackay was about to go to the cellar to check on his wounded, he remembers “a blinding flash and a terrific explosion. The next thing I knew, someone was slapping my face.” During the fire the Germans had brought up antitank Panzerfäuste in an effort to demolish the little force once and for all. With dazed disbelief Mackay saw that the entire southwest corner of the school and part of the still-smoldering roof had been blown away. Worse, the classrooms now resembled a charnel house with dead and wounded everywhere. “Only a few minutes later,” Mackay recalls, “someone came over and said he thought we were surrounded. I looked out one of the windows. Down below was a mass of Germans. Funnily enough, they weren’t doing anything, just standing around on the grass. They were on all sides of us except the west. They must have thought the Panzerfäuste had finished us off, because we had stopped firing.”
Making his way carefully around the bodies on the floor, Mackay ordered his men to take up grenades. “When I yell Fire!’ open up with everything you have,” he said. Back at the southeast window, Mackay gave the order. “The boys dropped grenades on the heads below and we instantly followed up with all we had left: six Brens and fourteen Sten guns, firing at maximum rate.” In the din, paratroopers stood silhouetted in the windows, firing their machine guns from the hip and yelling their war cry, “Whoa Mohammed.” Within minutes the counterattack was over. As Mackay recalls, “when I looked out again, all I could see below was a carpet of gray. We must have wiped out between thirty and fifty Germans.”
Now his men went about collecting the dead and wounded. One man was dying with fifteen bullets in the chest. Five other men were critically injured and almost all the troopers had sustained burns trying to save the blazing roof. Mackay had also been hit again by shrapnel and he discovered that his foot was pinned to his boot. Neither Mackay nor Sapper Pinky White, the acting medical orderly, could remove the metal and Mackay laced his boot tighter to keep the swelling down. Out of fifty men, Mackay now had only twenty-one in good shape; four were dead, and twenty-five wounded. Although he had no food and only a little water, he had collected a plentiful supply of morphia and was able to ease the pains of the injured. “Almost everybody was suffering from shock and fatigue,” he remembers, “but we had gotten ourselves another temporary breathing space. I just didn’t think things looked too bright, but we’d heard the BBC and they told us that everything was going according to plan. I got on the wireless to the Colonel, gave in our strength return and said we were all happy and holding our own.”
As Lance Corporal Hendy tried to catch a few minutes’ sleep he heard a church bell off in the distance. At first he thought that it was ringing to announce the approach of Horrocks’ tanks, but the sound was not measured and consistent. Hendy realized that bullets or shell fragments must be hitting the bell. He thought of the men around Colonel Frost’s headquarters on the other side of the ramp and wondered if they were holding safe. He heard the bell again and felt himself shivering. He could not rid himself of an eerie, doomed feeling.
The help that Frost so urgently needed was agonizingly close—barely more than a mile away. Four battalions spread between St. Elisabeth’s Hospital and the Rhine were desperately trying to reach him. Lieutenant Colonel J. A. C. Fitch’s 3rd Battalion had been attempting to force its way along the Lion route—the Rhine river road that Frost had used in reaching the bridge two days before. In darkness, without communications, Fitch was unaware that three other battalions were also on the move—Lieutenant Colonel David Dobie’s 1st, Lieutenant Colonel G. H. Lea’s 11th, and Lieutenant Colonel W. D. H. McCardie’s 2nd South Stafford-shires; Dobie’s men were separated from him by only a few hundred yards.
At 4 A.M. on Tuesday, September 19, the 11th Battalion and the 2nd South Staffs began to move through the heavily built-up area between St. Elisabeth’s Hospital and the Arnhem Town Museum. South of them, on the Lion route, where Fitch had already encountered devastating opposition, the 1st Battalion was now attempting to push its way through. Initially the three battalions, coordinating their movements, gained ground. Then, with dawn, their cover disappeared. German opposition, uneven throughout the night, was suddenly fiercely concentrated. The advance ground to a halt as the battalions found themselves in a tight net, trapped on three sides by an enemy who seemed almost to have waited for them to arrive at a preplanned position. And the Germans were prepared for a massacre.
Forward elements were hit and stopped in their tracks by German tanks and half-tracks blocking the streets ahead. From the windows of houses on the high escarpment of the railway marshaling yards to the north, waiting machine-gun crews opened up. And from the brickworks across the Rhine multibarreled flak guns, firing horizontally, ripped into Dobie’s battalion and flayed Fitch’s men as they tried to move along the lower Rhine road. Fitch’s battalion, already badly mauled in the fighting since landing two days bef
ore, was now so cut to pieces by the unremitting flak fire that it could no longer exist as an effective unit. Men broke in confusion. They could go neither forward nor back. With virtually no protection on the open road, they were methodically mowed down. “It was painfully obvious,” says Captain Ernest Seccombe, “that the Jerries had much more ammunition than we did. We tried to move in spurts, from cover to cover. I had just begun one dash when I was caught in a murderous crossfire. I fell like a sack of potatoes. I couldn’t even crawl.” Seccombe, who had been hit in both legs, watched helplessly as two Germans approached him. The British captain, who spoke fluent German, asked them to look at his legs. They bent down and examined his wounds. Then one of the Germans straightened up. “I’m sorry, Herr Hauptmann,” he told Seccombe. “I’m afraid for you the war is over.” The Germans called their own medics and Seccombe was taken to St. Elisabeth’s Hospital.*
By chance one of Fitch’s officers discovered the presence of Dobie’s forces on the lower road, and the men of the 1st Battalion, despite their own heavy casualties, hurried forward, toward the pitiable remnants of Fitch’s group. Dobie was now hell bent on reaching the bridge, but the odds were enormous. As he moved up into the intense fire and leapfrogged over Fitch’s men, Dobie himself was wounded and captured (he later succeeded in making his escape); by the end of the day it was estimated that only forty men of his battalion remained. Private Walter Boldock was one of them. “We kept trying to make it, but it was a disaster. We were constantly mortared, and German tanks whirled right up to us. I tried to get one with my Bren gun and then we seemed to be going backwards. I passed a broken water main. A dead civilian in blue overalls lay in the gutter, the water lapping gently around his body. As we left the outskirts of Arnhem, I knew somehow we wouldn’t be going back.”
Fitch’s men, attempting to follow Dobie’s battalion, were shredded once again. The march had lost all meaning; after-action reports indicate the total confusion within the battalion at this point. “Progress was satisfactory until we reached the area of the dismantled pontoon bridge,” reads the 3rd Battalion’s report. “Then casualties from the 1st Battalion began passing through us. Heavy machine guns, 20 mm. and intense mortar fire began … casualties were being suffered at an ever-increasing rate, and the wounded were being rushed back in small groups every minute.”
With his force in danger of total destruction, Fitch ordered his men back to the Rhine Pavilion, a large restaurant-building complex on the bank of the river, where the remnants of the battalion could regroup and take up positions. “Every officer and man must make his way back as best he can,” Fitch told his troopers. “The whole area seems covered by fire, and the only hope of getting out safely is individually.” Private Robert Edwards remembers a sergeant “whose boots were squelching blood from his wounds, telling us to get out and make our way back to the first organized unit we came to.” Colonel Fitch did not reach the Rhine Pavilion. On the deadly road back, he was killed by mortar fire.
By an odd set of circumstances, two men who should never have been there actually made their way into Arnhem. Major Anthony Deane-Drummond, the second in command of Division signals, had become so alarmed over the breakdown of communications that, with his batman-driver, Lance Corporal Arthur Turner, he had gone forward to discover the trouble. Deane-Drummond and Turner had been on the road since early Monday. First they had located Dobie’s battalion, where they had learned that Frost was on the bridge and Dobie was preparing an attack to get through to him. Setting off on the river road, Deane-Drummond caught up with elements of the 3rd Battalion struggling toward Arnhem and traveled with them. Heavy fire engulfed the group and in the fighting that ensued Deane-Drummond found himself leading the remnants of a company whose officer had been killed.
Under constant small-arms fire and so surrounded that Deane-Drummond remembers the Germans were tossing stick grenades at the men, he led the group along the road to some houses near a small inlet. Ahead, he could see the bridge. “The last couple of hundred yards to the houses I had decided on, the men were literally dropping like flies,” he recalls. “We were down to about twenty men, and I realized the rest of the battalion was now far to the rear and not likely to reach us.” Dividing the men into three parties, Deane-Drummond decided to wait until darkness, move down to the river, swim across it, then try to recross and join Division to the west. In a small corner house with the Germans all around, he settled down to wait. A banging began on the front door. Deane-Drummond and the three men with him raced to the back of the house and locked themselves in a small lavatory. From the noise from outside the little room, it was clear that the Germans were busy converting the house into a strong point. Deane-Drummond was trapped. He and the others would remain in the tiny room for the better part of three more days.*
Meanwhile, the nth Battalion and the South Staffordshires, after several hours of relentless street fighting, had also come to a standstill. Counterattacking German tanks hammered the battalions, forcing them to pull slowly back.
Private Maurice Faulkner remembers that elements of the battalions reached the museum with heavy casualties, only to encounter the tanks. “I saw one man jump out of a window on top of a tank and try to put a grenade in,” Faulkner recalls. “He was killed by a sniper, but I think he was probably trapped anyway, and he may have figured that was the only way out.” Private William O’Brien says that the situation was “suddenly chaotic. Nobody knew what to do. The Germans had brought up those Nebelwerfer mortar throwers and we were scared out of our minds at the screaming sound. It began to seem to me that the generals had gotten us into something they had no business doing. I kept wondering where the hell was the goddam Second Army.”
Private Andrew Milbourne, near the church at Oosterbeek, heard the call go out for machine-gunners. Milbourne stepped forward and was told to take his gun and a crew to the juncture of the road near St. Elisabeth’s Hospital to help cover and protect the two battalions as they disengaged. Putting his Vickers machine gun in a jeep, Milbourne set off with three others. Milbourne positioned his gun in the garden of a house at the crossroads. Almost immediately he seemed to be engulfed in his own private battle. Mortar bursts and shells appeared to be aimed directly at him. As troopers began to fall back around him, Milbourne sent a constant arc of bullets out in front of them. He remembers hearing a rushing sound, like wind, and then a flash. Seconds later he knew that something was wrong with his eyes and hands. He remembers someone saying, “Lord, he’s copped it.”
Private Thomas Pritchard heard the voice and ran to where men were now standing over Milbourne. “He was lying over the twisted Vickers with both hands hanging by a thread of skin and an eye out of its socket. We started yelling for a medic.” Not far away Milbourne’s best friend, Corporal Terry “Taffy” Brace of the 16th Field Ambulance, heard someone shout. Leaving a shrapnel case he had treated, Brace sprinted forward. “Quick,” a man called out to him, “the Vickers has caught it.” As he ran, Brace remembers, he could hear an almost steady sound of machine-gun fire, and shells and mortars seemed to be dropping everywhere. Approaching a cluster of men, he pushed his way through and, to his horror, saw Milbourne lying on the ground. Working frantically, Brace wrapped Milbourne’s arms and put a dressing just below the injured man’s cheekbone to cushion his left eye. Brace remembers talking constantly as he worked. “It’s just a scratch, Andy,” he kept saying. “It’s just a scratch.” Picking up his friend, Brace carried Milbourne to a nearby dressing station where a Dutch doctor immediately set to work. Then he went back to battle.*
Brace passed what seemed to be hundreds of men lying in the fields and along the road. “I stopped at every one,” he recalls. “The only thing I could do for most of them was take off their smocks and cover their faces.” Brace treated one injured sergeant as best he could and then as he prepared to set out again, the man reached out to him. “I’m not going to make it,” he told Brace. “Please hold my hand.” Brace sat down and cupped the sergeant’s han
d in both of his. He thought of Milbourne, his best friend, and of the many men who had come streaming back through the lines this day. A few minutes later, Brace felt a slight pull. Looking down, he saw that the sergeant was dead.
By now the British were in confusion, without antitank guns, out of Piat ammunition and suffering heavy casualties. The attack had become a shambles. The two battalions could not drive beyond the built-up areas around St. Elisabeth’s Hospital. But in that maze of streets one action was both positive and successful. The attack had overrun a terrace house at Zwarteweg 14, the building from which General Roy Urquhart had been unable to escape.
“We heard the wheeze of the self-propelled gun outside and the rattle of its track,” Urquhart later wrote. “It was moving off.” Antoon Derksen then appeared and “announced excitedly that the British were at the end of the road. We ran down the street and I thanked God we had made contact again.”
Urquhart, learning from an officer of the South Staffordshires that his headquarters was now in a hotel called the Hartenstein in Oosterbeek, commandeered a jeep and, driving at full speed through a constant hail of sniper fire, at last reached Division.
The time was 7:25 A.M. He had been absent and lacking control of the battle in its most crucial period, for almost thirty-nine hours.
At the Hartenstein, one of the first men to see Urquhart was Chaplain G. A. Pare. “The news had not been so good,” he recalls. “The General had been reported a prisoner and there was no sign of the Second Army.” As Pare came down the steps of the hotel “who should be ascending but the General. Several of us saw him, but nobody said a word. We just stared—completely taken aback.” Dirty and with “two days’ beard on my face I must have been something to see,” Urquhart says. At that moment Colonel Charles Mackenzie, the chief of staff, came rushing out. Staring at Urquhart, Mackenzie told him, “We had assumed, sir, that you had gone for good.”
A Bridge Too Far Page 36