Dutch Girl

by Robert Matzen

  After what seemed like a lifetime of tense footsteps, off to the right Frost saw his first objective: the railroad bridge over the Rhine that he must capture intact. Once he had done this, his men could race over it and his unit would capture both ends of the Arnhem Road Bridge at once before the Germans understood or responded. He knew that if he didn’t take the bridges, the whole grand operation involving 30,000 American and British troops could collapse. He would be answerable at that point, if he happened to live, to Field Marshal Montgomery himself.

  More than six miles to the northeast, Audrey, Ella, and Meisje huddled in the cellar with Opa as explosions sounded in the distance. The bulb in the ceiling joists that lit the enclosure flickered, went dark, lighted again, and then died, and they sat in darkness. As planes roared overhead and cannon boomed trying to knock those planes down, bombs began to fall once again, and the van Heemstras could but muse that just this morning they had fretted for the Baron’s life with the clock ticking on the German ultimatum for saboteurs to surrender themselves. With just a couple of hours to spare the Allied planes and paratroopers had arrived to save the day for many Dutch civilians. But such was the grim humor of this war that Dutch lives saved from a firing squad were taken by Allied bombs instead. Most likely the very last thing on the minds of the Germans this evening, as they fought to maintain their hold on Gelderland, was an act of sabotage at a lonely viaduct that had injured no one.

  Now, in the dim light of evening, the van Heemstras had no electric service and ate by the glow of candles from supplies grabbed on the way down the steps. In the far distance they could hear the staccato beats of machine-gun fire, punctuated every so often by rifle shots and the heavier boom of an exploding grenade. It all sounded so angry, so deadly. There were shouts from the street, always in German, directing traffic and ordering faster movement. Schnell! Schnell! The desperation of the Germans revealed itself to the cellar dwellers by the speed of the trucks and tanks zooming down toward the Velperweg to join the battle, and those frequent shouts and raised voices and sharp exchanges of conversation.

  Such a strange feeling to have Allied soldiers on the same parcel of earth, practically in the neighborhood. They weren’t in planes flying high overhead on daily missions to bomb Germany; they were real foot soldiers close by and paying attention to Arnhem! Ella could but wish that she had received an offer in response to the classified advertisement in The Hague, but time had run out all too fast. And here she and Audrey sat in the one place they couldn’t afford to be. The battle for Arnhem, the battle to free the people of the Netherlands, had begun.

  23

  Cakewalk

  As a Hollywood star shining bright in early 1954, Audrey would sum up her little corner of the war very simply: “Arnhem took a bit of everything—the bombs, then the occupation, and finally the Airborne.” The entirety of her description of the experience of Operation Market Garden would be summed up in two words: the Airborne—the British division of 10,000 men, nicknamed “Red Devils,” who had been assigned the task of dropping near Arnhem and capturing the bridge. They dressed in drab green uniforms with a red Pegasus emblem on their shoulders, and those that didn’t wear helmets sported red berets. They were bright, cheerful chaps despite the dirty work assigned to them. As would-be liberators, they marched into the hearts of the people of Gelderland in these few days, no matter how many civilians were killed, or homes destroyed, or lives disrupted. They were the Tommies, the liberators, and they captured Audrey’s heart the same as everyone else’s.

  The man who would become the most famous of the liberators at Arnhem, Colonel Frost, kept leading his men on in the twilight. The shooting to the north had swept the locals off the streets and safely inside where they belonged. This was deadly business and finally the welcoming civilians had come to understand that. As Frost’s serpentine column neared the railroad bridge, he received a report that his men had captured it intact. Then, BOOM! The southern end of the span went up with a heavy charge of German-laid dynamite. Frost could see his treasured objective shoot skyward in a terrific explosion heard for miles around, at which point he understood that the report of its capture was “a little premature.” The Jerries had blown it at the very last instant—if they couldn’t have it, no one would.

  There was no course of action now but to keep moving on to the all-important main objective, the Arnhem Road Bridge, less than three miles farther on. Frost ordered his men along, burdened as they were by all their equipment. It was clear now that the enemy was close, and sure enough, in another moment the shooting began. Many of his men were hit but Frost kept them going and knew from constant study of his maps in recent days that he had entered Arnhem, which he confirmed when up to his left he could see a long, impressive, three-story building he knew to be St. Elisabeth’s Hospital. By now he had the bridge in view ahead.

  The Tommies clomped onto the streets of the city center and soon they stood at the deck of the bridge they had come to capture. Frost could see some buildings on the far side of the ramp leading off the bridge. There was a big white villa with the name de Nijenburgh at the top, a school with the name van Limburg Stirum, and a third building painted red. Past these three structures stood some sort of music academy. Off to the left, according to the map, was a theater called the Schouwburg. Frost couldn’t know that all these structures were important to the history of a family called van Heemstra. The schoolhouse in the middle was the pride and joy of Cornelia, Countess van Limburg Stirum. On one side was her home, and on the other the villa that had been Baron van Heemstra’s home for the entire time he had served as mayor of the city. Now it was painted red and served as a second school building.

  Across the street from Countess van Limburg Stirum’s villa lived twenty-two-year-old Piet Hoefsloot, who heard rumors of invasion and, anticipating trouble, had led his big family to the cellar of their row house. He was among the first Dutch to see Frost’s men arrive at their prize, the bridge. “Late in the evening …,” said Hoefsloot, “we saw the first English soldiers who were walking directly opposite our house on the far side of the boulevard to the van Limburg Stirum School. Immediately afterwards, we heard that the necessary windows were being smashed open.”

  It was almost dark now. As one of Frost’s men put it, “The CO arrived and seemed extremely happy, making cracks about everyone’s nerves being jumpy.”

  Yes, Frost was elated “to see that big bridge still intact and our soldiers getting on to it,” he said, “not blown in their faces like the railway bridge.” He looked about him at a number of beautiful homes and buildings near the northern end of the bridge and chose those to be occupied by his men. Among them was an office building that became his headquarters and the sturdy van Limburg Stirum School across the bridge ramp. There was no better place to set up anti-tank weapons and machine guns than the windows of that school.

  Hunkered in another building near the bridge was Wilhelmina Schouten, a language teacher. “Someone opened the front door,” she wrote in her diary, “and within a moment the ground floor and the basement were full of soldiers.” She reported that these Tommies made little noise, were polite, and quickly told a little of themselves. “There were several wounded among them,” said Schouten. “One Irishman had lost two fingers on the way; he did not want to stay behind because, he said, he could still fire with one hand. Another man had been shot in the eye and the thigh. Yet another had been shot in his stomach; he was the worst of all.”

  Night had fallen. Off to Frost’s left a half mile, over the tops of the old-town buildings and the trees, fires in central Arnhem continued to rage brightly, with molten embers drifting into the sky. The firelight made the uniforms and dirty skin of the men glow orange. It seemed likely the big fire was the death throes of the Wehrmacht barracks up near the train station that had been knocked out by the morning’s air strikes. Frost was a great one for studying the maps; he believed he couldn’t know too much about the terrain he’d be fighting for in coming days.
/>
  Frost sent out some men to try to capture the bridge, but a German machine gun let loose at point-blank range on his poor men. The survivors scurried back to safety, dragging wounded with them. The battle grew more intense as German armored vehicles tried to drive across the bridge into Arnhem, and the paratroopers fired on them until all erupted in flame.

  The great racket alerted every German soldier and civilian in the area exactly what was going on in downtown Arnhem, but the blackness of night held everyone in check, and Frost could do nothing but sit in Arnhem Centraal and wait. All over the area to his west as he sat at the bridge, he could hear stuttering bursts of machine guns along with occasional artillery explosions and grenades. Sometimes they were accompanied by ghostly powder flashes like lightning.

  Before dawn on Monday, 18 September, along the Pietersbergseweg in Oosterbeek just three-and-a-half miles west of the bridge, another group of soldiers filed by under a window of a house just down the street from the baron’s old Villa Roestenburg, the place where Audrey and her brothers used to play with such glee. The night in Oosterbeek had included gunfire and explosions that had terrified the citizens. The men seen by locals now in blackness of night tiptoed in hunched fashion single-file along the edge of the street. It was plain they feared for their lives. Oosterbeek teenager Anje van Maanen, who was just Audrey’s age, watched ghostly figures pass by the window with her family, and they speculated whether these ghosts were the prayed-for Tommies or just the dirty moffen. If the latter, the van Maanens would be machine-gunned without hesitation. Finally, the curiosity of Anje’s Tante Auke forced her to fling open a window. She called brightly, “Good morning!”

  “We get a fright,” said Anje in her diary, “but then we hear them answer, ‘Sst, Ssst! Good morning.’ Whispering figures in the darkness, but they are Tommies and so we are free, free, free!” Yes, they were Tommies. They had been desperate to find a path to the bridge so they could join Frost; they had spent the night groping along trying to get through Oosterbeek with its winding streets, garden walls, hedges, shrubbery, and other symbols of the Dutch gentility. And behind any of these obstacles on a night with a new moon could be found a heavily armed German. Finally, with the sun was peeking over the horizon, the poor men were nearly frightened to death by an old Dutch woman wishing them a good morning.

  An excited Anje grabbed what food she could from the cellar to present to her brave liberators out on the Pietersbergseweg. She said, “It has grown a little less dark and we can now see the street crowded with people in pajamas or dressing gowns, carrying all sorts of food, trays with cups of tea, coffee or milk, bread, pears, apples. All one can possibly eat is produced by a lot of very glad Dutch people as a welcome to our liberators.”

  On the Utrechtseweg running through Oosterbeek toward Arnhem, Anje saw a line of British vehicles representing the relief column meant for Colonel Frost at the bridge. She referred to them in her diary as “our Airborne.” The citizens showered the liberators with love as morning brightened. Off to the right toward Arnhem, a battle was growing in intensity, and the Tommies didn’t hesitate to push right on toward it.

  Back at the bridge, the men of Frost’s command battled against Germans attacking from all directions. German tanks were everywhere, and the paratroopers fought for their lives as central Arnhem was chewed to pieces by sprays of machine-gun fire and the blasting of grenades and cannon.

  Finally at three o’clock in the afternoon, more Allied aircraft roared off to the west. It was the second wave of British Airborne paratroopers coming down in the drop and landing zones. Hundreds of brightly colored parachutes filled the air and a wave of gliders came in for lovely landings. But from positions at the bridge, the paratroopers could also see transport planes going down in flames.

  In Velp, Audrey could see none of it in the cellar of the Beukenhof, but oh, the sounds of battle. Rifles and machine guns and grenades and artillery—constant, horrible, and every instant all in the cellar knew that humans were dying, torn to pieces no doubt, hour after hour. And poor Arnhem, what of that? Then this new sound, the drone of more planes was enough to rattle the teeth. Now came the distant boom-boom-boom of anti-aircraft cannon shooting at something in the sky, and overhead, the pitch of the engines changed as the armada of airplanes banked sharply and began to head west again. More and more planes did that very thing just above their heads, it seemed. This must be another grand event that was bringing liberation closer. It just had to be.

  In theory it was. Another batch of British paratroopers had landed, their mission delayed for hours by fog in England. They attempted to join the battle and reach the bridge, but German troops were flooding into the area with tanks and cannon far bigger than anything possessed by the Tommies.

  On this Monday afternoon, Steven Jansen of Oranjestraat in Velp wrote in his diary that he had finally witnessed the sight he had longed for on the streets of his village: the liberators! “We have already seen the first English,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, as prisoners.” Groups of British soldiers were moving along with hands up. They had been stripped of their steel-pot helmets and equipment, and most sported red berets—others were bare-headed.

  Farther up Hoofdstraat, ten-year-old Clan Visser ’t Hooft and her siblings—children of Audrey’s friend, Dr. Visser ’t Hooft—had found safety in their cellar and were peering out the window where they could see movement on the pavement past their broad lawn. Their cellar window was just about the best in town for observing German troop movements; they lived near the point where Hoofdstraat became the Zutphenseweg and ran straight into Germany. Mostly, the vehicles the children saw speeding through Velp were German and heading to Arnhem—troop transports, tanks, half-tracks, and motorcycles. But now the Visser ’t Hoofts watched an amazing sight heading east.

  Clan’s younger sister Annemarth saw military men marching past and heard heavy boots. “Clonk, clonk, clonk,” she said, “and these soldiers were whistling. Germans never whistled. They were Tommies! Big groups of prisoners of war marching and whistling, and behind them shuffled the German guards with their sinister guns.” The six year old could make no sense of it—the prisoners were whistling—at gunpoint!

  Medical orderly Cpl. Arthur Hatcher had been captured at St. Elisabeth’s Hospital with more than fifty of his mates who also used music as a show of resilience. He said, “We were still full of confidence and thought we would be relieved any minute and we would be top dog again. The Germans didn’t like it, but they didn’t stop us.”

  For the residents of Velp, none of this made any sense. How could there be so many Allied paratroopers falling from the sky to the west, and heavy fighting all around, and Arnhem and parts of Velp burning to the ground, but now British soldiers by the score were being led off as prisoners? Even with telephone service cut, reports circulated around the entire area: parachutes near Heelsum and Renkum! A British column in Oosterbeek! Tommies on the Arnhem Road Bridge!

  British Airborne trying to reach Frost at the bridge were stunned at the strength of the German opposition they met between St. Elisabeth’s Hospital and the bridge area. Soon the Tommies found themselves in disorganized groups fighting for their lives in the residential streets of western Arnhem, with shocked civilians in every house. Cpl. Donald Collins of the 1st Parachute Battalion would recall that in the heat of this terrific battle, “to my amazement, I saw at different intervals Dutch ladies cleaning the inside of their front windows. I presume that their curiosity overcame their caution, and they were doing this as an excuse to see what was going on.” But then Collins didn’t know the Dutch; no matter the lead flying about, Monday was probably the day to wash the windows. And that was that.

  The battle witnessed by those housewives was vicious and fought at close quarters, Tommies against tanks, arms and legs blown off, bodies everywhere, and nothing seemed to be getting better. Just to the east, the Velpenaren had a different view out their windows: More and more Germans were entering the village to join the fight on
e town over. Not only zooming down from Rozendaal and Zutphen but also rolling past on trains right through the center of Velp. Those first orders issued by German commanders Model and Bittrich had set off a rapid response to thwart the attack of the Allies, and the Airborne couldn’t imagine what had become of their cakewalk.

  By Monday night the battle sprawled from the business district of Oosterbeek eastward all the way through western and central Arnhem to the bridge, with pockets of confused paratroopers just about everywhere, cut off by swarms of Germans. British casualties were atrocious, food and ammunition were running out, and the radios worked only sporadically.

  Piet Hoefsloot, in the family cellar for the third day with his many siblings and other relatives, reported, “On Tuesday 19 September it became very dangerous. During the day we saw from our rear garden that all other houses in our boulevard were burning like torches and the wind was coming in our direction.” General Bittrich had decided enough was enough and it was time to end the battle at the bridge. He ordered the burning of all structures that might shelter enemy troops in the bridge area.

  Colonel Frost’s command had nearly run out of ammunition and his casualties were heavy. “New weapons came to harry us and all the buildings by the bridge were set on fire,” he reported. “Toward evening heavy tanks appeared, incredibly menacing and sinister in the half-light, as their guns swung from target to target. Shells burst through our walls. The dust and settling debris following their explosions filled the passages and rooms.”