Urquhart hoped to contrive other indications of “normality”—the usual pattern of radio transmissions would continue; Sheriff Thompson’s artillery was to fire to the last; and military police in and about the German prisoner-of-war compound on the Harten-stein’s tennis courts were to continue their patrols. They would be among the very last to leave. Obviously, besides a rear guard, other men would have to stay behind—doctors, medical orderlies and serious casualties. Wounded men unable to walk but capable of occupying defensive positions would stay and continue firing.
To reach the river, Urquhart’s men would follow one route down each side of the perimeter. Glider pilots, acting as guides, would steer them along the escape path, marked in some areas with white tape. Troopers, their boots muffled by strips of cloth, were to make their way to the water’s edge. There, beachmasters would load them into a small evacuation fleet: fourteen powered storm boats—managed by two companies of Canadian engineers—each capable of carrying fourteen men, and a variety of smaller craft. Their number was indeterminate. No one, including the beachmasters, would remember how many, but among them were several DUKWs and a few canvas-and-plywood assault craft remaining from previous crossings.
Urquhart was gambling that the Germans observing the boat traffic would assume men were trying to move into the perimeter rather than out of it. Apart from the dreadful possibility of his troops being detected other hazardous difficulties could occur as more than two thousand men tried to escape. If a rigid time schedule was not maintained, Urquhart could foresee, an appalling bottleneck would develop at the narrow base of the perimeter, now barely 650 yards wide. If they were jammed into the embarkation area, his men might be mercilessly annihilated. After the futile experience of the Poles and the Dorsets in trying to enter the perimeter, Urquhart did not expect the evacuation to go unchallenged. Although every gun that XXX Corps could bring to bear would be in action to protect his men, Urquhart still expected the Germans to inflict heavy casualties. Time was an enemy, for it would take hours to complete the evacuation. There was also the problem of keeping the plan secret. Because men might be captured and interrogated during the day, no one, apart from senior officers and those given specific tasks, was to be told of the evacuation until the last minute.
After conferring with General Thomas by radio and obtaining agreement on the major points in his withdrawal plan, Urquhart called a meeting of the few senior officers left: Brigadier Pip Hicks; Lieutenant Colonel Iain Murray of the Glider Pilot Regiment, now in charge of the wounded Hackett’s command; Lieutenant Colonel R. G. Loder-Symonds, the division’s artillery chief; Colonel Mackenzie, the chief of staff; and Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Myers, the engineering officer who would be in charge of the evacuation. Just before the conference began, Colonel Graeme Warrack, the chief medical officer, arrived to see Urquhart and became the first man to learn of the plan. Warrack was “downcast and unhappy. Not because I had to stay—I had an obligation to the wounded—but because up to this moment I had expected the division to be relieved in a very short time.”
In the Hartenstein cellar, surrounded by his officers, Urquhart broke the news. “We’re getting out tonight,” he told them. Step by step he outlined his plan. The success of the withdrawal would depend on meticulous timing. Any concentration of troops or traffic jams could cause disaster. Men were to be kept moving, without stopping to fight. “While they should take evasive action if fired upon, they should only fire back if it is a matter of life or death.” As his despondent officers prepared to leave, Urquhart cautioned them that the evacuation must be kept secret as long as possible. Only those with a need to know were to be told.
The news carried little surprise for Urquhart’s senior officers. For hours it had been obvious that the position was hopeless. Still, like Warrack, they were bitter that relief had never arrived. In their minds, too, was the fear that their men might endure an even greater ordeal during the withdrawal than they had in the perimeter. By accident Signalman James Cockrill, attached to division headquarters, heard the terse message: “Operation Berlin is tonight.” He puzzled over its meaning. Withdrawal did not even occur to him. Cockrill believed the division “would fight to the last man and the last bullet.” He thought that “Operation Berlin” might mean an all-out attempt to break through for the Arnhem bridge “in some kind of heroic ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ or something.” Another man knew all too clearly what it meant. At the headquarters of the 1st Airlanding Brigade, Colonel Payton-Reid of the KOSB’s, helping to arrange details of the evacuation of the western edge of the perimeter, heard Brigadier Pip Hicks mutter something about “another Dunkirk.”
All through this day, in a frenzy of attacks, the Germans tried to overrun positions, but still the Red Devils held. Then, men would recall, shortly after 8 P.M. the news of the withdrawal began filtering down. To Major George Powell of Hackett’s 156th Battalion, at the top of the perimeter, the news was “an appalling blow. I thought of all the men who had died, and then I thought the whole effort had been a waste.” Because his men were among those who had the farthest to come, Powell started them off in single file at 8:15 P.M.
Private Robert Downing of the 10th Parachute Battalion was told to leave his slit trench and go to the Hartenstein Hotel. There, he was met by a sergeant. “There’s an old plastic razor over there,” the sergeant told him. “You get yourself a dry shave.” Downing stared at him. “Hurry up,” the sergeant told him. “We’re crossing the river and by God we’re going back looking like British soldiers.”
In a cellar near his position Major Robert Cain borrowed another razor. Someone had found water, and Cain scraped the razor over a week’s growth of beard and then dried his face carefully on the inside of his smoke-blackened, bloodstained smock. Coming out he stood for a minute in lashing rain looking at the church in lower Oosterbeek. There was a gold cock on the weather vane. Cain had checked it at intervals during the battle. For him, it was a good luck symbol. As long as the gold cock remained, so would the division. He felt an overpowering sadness. He wondered if the weather vane would still be there tomorrow.
Like other men, Major Thomas Toler of the Glider Pilot Regiment had been told by Colonel Iain Murray to clean up a little. Toler couldn’t have cared less. He was so tired that just “thinking about cleaning up was an effort.” Murray handed over his own razor. “We’re getting out. We don’t want the army to think we’re a bunch of tramps.” With a small dab of lather that Murray had left, Toler too shaved his beard. “It was amazing how much better I felt, mentally and physically,” he recalls. In Murray’s command post was the Pegasus flag Hackett’s men had planned to fly as the Second Army arrived. Toler stared at it for a moment. Then he carefully rolled it up and put it away.
In artillery positions where troopers now would fire at will to help disguise the evacuation, Gunner Robert Christie listened as the troop’s signalman, Willie Speedie, called in to the battery. Speedie gave a new station as control and then said simply, “I am closing down now. Out.”
Sergeant Stanley Sullivan, one of the pathfinders who had led the way nine days before, was furious when the news reached him. “I had already figured we’d had it anyway and we might as well go down fighting.” Sullivan’s outpost was in a school “where youngsters had been trying to learn. I was afraid for all those children if we pulled out. I had to let them know, and the Germans too, just how we felt.” On the blackboard in the room he had been defending, Sullivan printed large block letters and underlined them several times. The message read: “We’ll Be Back!!!”*
At precisely 9 P.M., the night sky was ripped by the flash of XXX Corps’s massed guns, and fires broke out all along the edge of the perimeter as a torrent of shells rained down on the German positions. Forty-five minutes later, Urquhart’s men started to pull out. The bad weather that had prevented the prompt arrival of troops and supplies during the week now worked for the Red Devils; the withdrawal began in near-gale-like conditions which—with the din of the
bombardment—helped cover up the British escape.
In driving wind and rain the 1st Airborne survivors, faces blackened, equipment tied down and boots muffled against sound, climbed stiffly out of positions and lined up for the dangerous trek down to the river. The darkness and the weather made it impossible for men to see more than a few feet in front of them. The troopers formed a living chain, holding hands or clinging to the camouflage smock of the man ahead.
Sergeant William Tompson, a glider pilot, hunched his body against the pouring rain. Charged with helping to direct troopers to the riverbank, he was prepared for a long wet night. As he watched men file past he was struck by the fact that “few men but us had ever known what it was like to live in a mile-square abattoir.”
To Signalman James Cockrill the meaning of “Operation Berlin” was now only too clear. He had been detailed to stay behind and operate his set as the troops withdrew. His instructions were “to stay on the air and keep the set functioning to make the Germans think everything is normal.” Cockrill sat alone in darkness under the veranda of the Hartenstein, “bashing away on the key. I could hear a lot of movement around me, but I had no other instructions than to keep the set on the air.” Cockrill was certain that he would be a prisoner before morning. His rifle was propped up beside him, but it was useless. One bullet was a dummy, containing the cypher code used to contact Second Army. It was the only one he had left.
On the Rhine’s southern bank, doctors, medical orderlies and Dutch Red Cross nursing personnel stood ready in reception areas and at the collection point. In Driel convoys of ambulances and vehicles waited to move Urquhart’s survivors back to Nijmegen. Although preparations for the arrival of the men were going on all about her, Cora Baltussen, after three days and nights tending the wounded, was so exhausted she thought the bombardment and the activities on the southern bank marked the prelude to yet another crossing attempt. In the concentrated shelling of Driel, Cora had been wounded by shrapnel in the head, left shoulder and side. Although the injuries were painful, Cora considered them superficial. She was more concerned about her bloody dress. She cycled home to change before returning to help tend the fresh flow of casualties she was certain would shortly arrive. On the way Cora rode into enemy shellfire. Thrown from her bicycle, she lay unhurt for some time in a muddy ditch, then she set off again. At home exhaustion overcame her. In the cellar she lay down for a short nap. She slept all through the night, unaware that “Operation Berlin” was taking place.
Along the river at the base of the perimeter the evacuation fleet, manned by Canadian and British engineers, lay waiting. So far the enemy’s suspicions had not been aroused. In fact, it was clear that the Germans did not know what was happening. Their guns were firing at the remaining Dorsets, who had begun a diversionary attack west of the perimeter. Still farther west, Germans were firing as British artillery laid down a barrage to give the appearance of a river assault in that area. Urquhart’s deception plan appeared to be working.
In the drenching rain, lines of men snaked slowly down both sides of the perimeter to the river. Some men were so exhausted that they lost their way and fell into enemy hands; others, unable to go on by themselves, had to be helped. In the inky darkness nobody stopped. To halt invited noise, confusion—and death.
In the ruddy glow of fires and burning buildings, Sergeant Ron Kent, of Major Boy Wilson’s pathfinder group, led his platoon to a cabbage patch designated as the company rendezvous point. There they waited until the remainder of the company assembled before moving toward the river. “Although we knew the Rhine lay due south,” Kent says, “we didn’t know what point they were evacuating us from.” Suddenly the men spotted lines of red tracers coming from the south and taking these as a guide, they moved on. Soon they came to white tape and the shadowy figures of glider pilots who directed them along. Kent’s group heard machine-gun fire and grenade explosions off to their left. Major Wilson and another group of men had run into Germans. In the fierce skirmish that followed, with safety only a mile away, two soldiers were killed.
Men were to remember the evacuation by small details-poignant, frightening and sometimes humorous. As Private Henry Blyton of the 1st Battalion moved down to the river, he heard someone crying. Ahead, the line stopped. Troopers made for the side of the path. There, lying on the sodden ground, was a wounded soldier crying for his mother. The men were ordered to keep on moving. No one was to stop for the wounded. Yet many did. Before troopers in Major Dickie Lonsdale’s force left their positions, they went to the Ter Horst house and took as many of the walking wounded as they could.
Lance Corporal Sydney Nunn, who with a glider pilot had knocked out a Tiger tank earlier in the week, thought he would never make it to the river. By the church where artillery positions had been overrun during the day, Nunn and a group of KOSB’s had a sharp, brief skirmish with the Germans. In the rain and darkness most of the men got away. Lying on the ground Nunn received the first injury he had had in nine days of fighting. Shrapnel hit some stones and one of Nunn’s front teeth was chipped by a pebble.
Sergeant Thomas Bentley of the 10th Battalion was following the Phantom operator, Lieutenant Neville Hay. “We were sniped at continually,” he remembers. “I saw two glider pilots walk out from the shadows and deliberately draw the German fire, apparently so we could see where it was coming from.” Both guides were killed.
In the Hartenstein, General Urquhart and his staff prepared to leave. The war diary was closed; papers were burned and then Hancock, the General’s batman, wrapped Urquhart’s boots with strips of curtain. Everybody knelt as a chaplain said the Lord’s Prayer. Urquhart remembered the bottle of whiskey his batman had put in his pack on D Day. “I handed it around,” Urquhart says, “and everyone had a nip.” Finally Urquhart went down to the cellars to see the wounded “in their bloody bandages and crude splints” and said goodbye to those aware of what was happening. Others, drowsy with morphia, were mercifully unaware of the withdrawal. One haggard soldier, propping himself up against the cellar wall, told Urquhart, “I hope you make it, sir.”
Lieutenant Commander Arnoldus Wolters, the Dutch liaison officer at Division headquarters, moving behind the General’s group, observed absolute silence. “With my accent had I opened my mouth I might have been taken for a German,” he says. At some point Wolters lost his grip on the man in front of him. “I didn’t know what to do. I simply kept going, praying that I was heading in the right direction.” Wolters felt particularly depressed. He kept thinking of his wife and the daughter he had never seen. He had not been able to phone them even though his family lived only a few miles from the Hartenstein. The watch he had bought for his wife in England was still in his pocket; the Teddy bear he had planned to give his daughter was somewhere in a wrecked glider. If he was lucky enough to make it back to the river, Wolters would be leaving, probably for England, once more.
At the river the crossings had begun. Lieutenant Colonel Myers and his beachmasters packed men into the boats as fast as they arrived. But now the Germans, though still not aware that a withdrawal was taking place, could see the ferrying operations by the light of flares. Mortars and artillery began ranging in. Boats were holed and capsized. Men struggling in the water screamed for help. Others, already dead, were swept away. Wounded men clung to wreckage and tried to swim to the southern bank. Within one hour half the evacuation fleet was destroyed, but still the ferrying went on.
By the time Major George Powell’s men reached the river from their long trek down the eastern side of the perimeter, Powell believed that the evacuation was over. A boat was bobbing up and down in the water, sinking lower as waves hit against it. Powell waded out. The boat was full of holes and the sappers in it were all dead. As some of his men struck out swimming, a boat suddenly appeared out of the dark. Powell hastily organized his men and got some of them aboard. He and the remaining troopers waited until the craft returned. On the high embankment south of the Rhine, Powell stood for a moment looking back
north. “All at once I realized I was across. I simply could not believe I had gotten out alive.” Turning to his fifteen bedraggled men, Powell said, “Form up in threes.” He marched them to the reception center. Outside the building, Powell shouted, “156th Battalion, halt! Right turn! Fall out!” Standing in the rain he watched them head for shelter. “It was all over, but by God we had come out as we had gone in. Proud.”
As General Urquhart’s crowded boat prepared to leave, it got caught in the mud. Hancock, his batman, jumped out and pushed them off. “He got us clear,” Urquhart says, “but as he struggled to get back aboard someone shouted, ‘Let go! It’s overcrowded already!’ ” Irked by this ingratitude “Hancock ignored the remark and, with his last reserves, pulled himself into the boat.”
Under machine-gun fire Urquhart’s boat was halfway across when the engine suddenly stuttered and stopped. The boat began to drift with the current; to Urquhart “it seemed an absolute age before the engine came to life again.” Minutes later they reached the southern bank. Looking back Urquhart saw flashes of fire as the Germans raked the river. “I don’t think,” he says, “they knew what they were firing at.”
All along the bank of the Rhine and in the meadows and woods behind, hundreds of men waited. But now with only half the fleet still operable and under heavy machine-gun fire, the bottleneck that Urquhart had feared occurred. Confusion developed in the crowded lines, and although there was no panic, many men tried to push forward, and their officers and sergeants tried to hold them in check. Lance Corporal Thomas Harris of the 1st Battalion remembers “hundreds and hundreds waiting to get across. Boats were being swamped by the weight of the numbers of men trying to board.” And mortars were now falling in the embarkation area as the Germans got the range. Harris, like many other men, decided to swim. Taking off his battle dress and boots, he dived in and, to his surprise, made it over.
A Bridge Too Far Page 55