‘Dig or die!’ is an old Army slogan. How we dug! I myself dug four slit trenches; two caved in through shell-blast; one was pinched by two Bren gun lads (with a strong Midlands accent) because of its clear line of fire; while the fourth received a direct hit by a mortar bomb just before we left. At the time we were being ‘briefed’ for the final effort - that nightmare mile and a half creep through enemy-held woods to the river and ultimate safety.
‘Nine days and nights of murderous concentrated fire, of never-ceasing shelling and mortaring of a space no larger than a square quarter-mile, had left nothing but destruction. Tall stately beeches reduced to mere stumps. Jeeps, trailers, mess-tins, everything riddled by shrapnel. Yet men lived through that hell - thanks to slit trenches - and a few saved themselves.
‘Vivid impressions of those days will remain. The frequent ‘stand-to’s’ to resist enemy infiltrations into our positions from the woods adjoining our little patch; the constant screech of shells and bullets from snipers perched in trees; the sleek brown pony we found grazing, peacefully enough, on our arrival. Some risked their lives to move him to fresh pastures. ‘He’s a Hun horse all right,’ said our major. ‘I took him some water and he kicked the bucket over.’ On the third day he was badly wounded by shrapnel; we had to shoot him. The amazing collection of animals that strayed in from the woods. A stately stag with his retinue of does. ‘Venison, by gad!’ said an officer, but we had no chance of that, unfortunately. Cows and heifers and finally and incongruously enough, a pig.
‘On Sunday evening, a week after our arrival, I looked out of my trench to see a truly amazing sight. I literally rubbed my eyes and looked again. A little old lady, dressed in black silk or satin, adorned with white lace, was walking slowly and with dignity into our clearing. She was obviously dazed or shell-shocked but she walked on. The snipers had apparently let her through. She was eighty; we were told and lived in the house by the well. There was, of course, nothing we could do; she was led back again by a big and somewhat embarrassed sergeant-major. One could picture her on happier Sunday evenings, dressing just as carefully for her visit to the village church. Her house was damaged by shell-fire later. I wonder what became of her.
‘More and more memories! The magnificent lads of the Glider Pilot Regiment, now fighting as infantry. A few would form up. ‘We are going to get back the hospital from Jerry,’ they told me. ‘There’s a tank giving our boys hell in the woods over there.’ ‘Jerry’s got a flame-thrower nearby - we’re going to get it.’ Sometimes they came back, some of them. The German prisoners, a nondescript lot of about 230 SS troops arrogant and sullen; boys of nineteen and twenty and men of over forty, eager to do odd jobs in return for tea and biscuits. The German equivalent to a WAAF who had returned from leave and had walked into our lines. Fat, dowdy and coarse-looking, she was said to be secretary to the local Gestapo. She cried bitterly the first night, but later, being reassured by considerate treatment, regained her composure. Together with other women suspected of collaborating with the Nazis, she was given comfortable enough quarters in a tennis pavilion and trenches were dug for them.
‘On the third day the Germans cut off our water supply. This meant a hazardous journey to the well. Jerry soon realized this and the snipers indulged in their favourite sport. Yet there was no lack of volunteers to fetch water. On the fifth day our rations gave out, yet one did not want to eat. It did not seem much of a hardship, to go three days on tea and a biscuit or two. Carefully and exactly our War Office Public Relations Officer doled out what was left. Cigarettes were plentiful at first, then seven, then five and finally two a day to each of us.
‘Rumours were abundant and varied. The 2nd Army is on its way! It is just over the river! No! the Guards Armoured Division has been involved in fierce fighting only five miles to the south; this latter unfortunately true. The resentment at the rosy ‘picture’ given on the BBC news. At last came good news; the Poles had dropped by parachute south of the river. Several hundred came over during the night. Their losses were grievous; it is stated that two-thirds were killed. A battalion of infantry were crossing at dusk! Actually some companies of the Dorsets crossed for the purpose of forming a bridgehead. Volunteers all, it is understood. Without this invaluable aid even ‘the few’ could not have got away. Who’s Afear’d? is the Dorsets’ motto. How well they lived up to it! Their losses were heavy in that gallant act of self-sacrifice.
‘Many stories have been told of the indomitable 1st Airborne Division. Many will never be told. The sergeant who waited in a lane in the woods for an approaching tank. At the crucial moment his PIAT refused to fire. Immediately the tank was surrounded by men whose only weapons were hand grenades. But they got the tank. The German psychological warfare weapon: ‘You are surrounded and have no chance,’ they bawled. ‘Think of your families and homes!’ The answer was a howl of derision from the ‘Red Devils’ and a burst of Bren and Sten gun fire. Jerry hastily withdrew. ‘Hold your fire, Tommy!’ he would yell. ‘We are friends.’ ‘Tommy’ held his fire until the enemy was within a few yards. The slaughter went on. No words can picture it in its grim and bloody detail.
‘A flame-thrower gave some trouble before it was disposed of. At last it came up to a position where an officer stood up with his ‘walkie-talkie,’ calling for artillery support to wipe it out. The Germans spotted him and from a few yards gave him a squirt. He rushed up the road, flaming from head to foot, but his men got to him, put out the flames and got him to the MDS, where they were told he would recover. A six-pounder gun crew eventually got the flame-thrower first shot and then gave it another five for luck. The boys went mad with joy.
‘Memories! The padre who braved everything to comfort the wounded regardless of danger finally decided to remain with his boys, in company with the medical staff. How those doctors worked right up to that final and magnificent decision! A major of Carstairs (Border Regiment), who was wounded in all limbs on the second day, but fought on to the end. He would say, ‘This position will be held!’ His men replied, ‘That’s OK sir!’ and ‘OK’ it was. Of Major-General Urquhart, who, when the situation was at its worst, went out defiantly to stick his ‘Airborne’ flag on the lawn of his HQ, by now a sad wreck. Of the glider pilots who would shout to Jerry, ‘Come on and fight!’ and sang Lili Marlene when they refused. Of the two South Staffs men who ‘annexed’ my trench. Putting their Bren pat on the parapet of sand and shouting ‘Come on, Jerry, blaze away, let’s get this over, we want a drink in Arnhem!’
‘The unforgettable sight of our re-supply bombers. Never have Stirlings, Halifaxes and Dakotas looked so beautiful. Wave after wave came in to drop their vital supplies of ammunition and food. How we danced and waved everything on which we could get our hands to show them where to drop! What guts those boys had - it was not their fault that most of the parachutes with their precious canisters fell in enemy-held territory, for by this time our perimeter had shrunk to a mere 1,200 yards by 900 yards. The flak that the Germans had brought up was intense; at a few hundred feet the bombers were just ‘sitting birds’ for the light stuff. Yet a number of aircraft made two or more ‘runs up’ in order to drop accurately. From a number of blazing aircraft the crews continued to unload when conceivably they might have bailed out themselves. ‘What guts!’ said a major next to me. The RAF did their damnedest to help us in the face of that intense flak. No one could have tried harder.
‘Not the least of our troubles was the regular three or four times a day visit from the Luftwaffe. Thirty or forty Me 109s at a time circled our little patch. They did not always attack, but when they did it was from almost tree-top height and most unpleasant. How heartened we were when our own air support arrived, to shoot-up the Hun positions! How those Typhoons, with their rockets and cannon, must have frightened Jerry! How we hoped they had spotted those 88s and SP guns that were giving us hell day and night! But if they did so the enemy brought up more. The last four days were just a repetition of intense mortaring and shelling. ‘And so on u
ntil the end. On the evening of the ninth day orders came to us to break out from our citadel - what was left of that once beautiful wood - and make our way across the Rhine. Sick and lightly wounded left their beds to take their chance with escape parties. Wherever possible these were given priority. Followed the ‘briefing.’ ‘Our party moves off at ten-four’ we were told. ‘Anyone wounded on the way will be carried to the river.’ ‘It’s going to be a tight finish,’ said one glider pilot to me. The silent, eerie journey through the woods, each holding the tail of the man in front. The rat-tat-tat of machine guns and the shells screaming over our heads. Every minute packed with intense drama. Would we make it? The river at last. ‘Get down flat!’ Star shells lighting up everything; how we cursed them! Occasional mortaring. Two hours wait in drenching rain for the boats. At last came our turn - no! There’s more wounded! Those Canadian REs who worked all night until dawn to get us across the Rhine. Arnhem burning in the distance.
‘Across at last; wading up to our waists for the last ten yards. But we were across - and alive! At dawn a number of the little band still left on the north bank were mown down by German guns. The evacuation was called ‘Operation Berlin.’
‘The rest of the story is now history.’
33 Conclusions, Airborne Operations In World War II European Theatre, No.97, Maxwell AFB, Alabama 1956, Air University USAF Historical Division Study (Military Affairs/Aerospace Historian Publishing, Manhattan, Kansas)
34 In January 1948 Browning became Comptroller and Treasurer to HRH the Princess Elizabeth Duchess of Edinburgh. After she ascended to the throne in 1952 he became treasurer in the Office of the Duke of Edinburgh. For his services to the Royal Household, Browning was made a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1953. Browning had been drinking since the war, but it became chronic and it led to a severe nervous breakdown in July 1957, forcing his resignation from his position at the Palace in 1959. Du Maurier had known of his taking a mistress in Fowey, but his breakdown brought to light two other girlfriends in London. Du Maurier confessed to her own wartime affair. Browning was advanced to Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order when he retired in 1959. He retreated to Menabilly, the mansion that had inspired Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, which she had leased and restored in 1943. Browning caused a scandal in 1963 when, under the influence of prescription drugs and alcohol, he was involved in a car accident in which two people were injured. He died from a coronary at Menabilly on 14 March 1965 aged 68.
35 The troop carrier Groups of IX TCC had received almost double the standard number of aircraft without any compensating increase in ground personnel.
36 Fighter and fighter-bomber units of the 8th Air Force, dispatched to protect the troop carrier missions from flak and enemy aircraft claimed to have destroyed 3 tanks, 35 trucks, 127 motor vehicles, 10 locomotives and 118 rail cars between 17 and 26 September.
37 Lateral dispersion could be reduced by flying in a column of V’s instead of the V of V’s. This hid been done with good results in a resupply mission on D plus 8, but in a large mission that formation produced too long a column.
38 That winter pilots of 38 Group under the direction of a control team using ‘talking Eureka’ made successful test from 7,000-10,000 feet with modified bomb sights and parachutes set to open at 1,500 feet.
Chapter 5
Operation ‘Pegasus’
‘We eventually got back to England in US Dakotas. We weren’t relieved to get back. You see, there was all those we’d left behind, the Dutch people and our friends. When we got back home it was then that we started to find out who was missing.’
Laurence Scott GM
As dawn came on Tuesday, 26 September there was no longer the sound of battle in evidence. The Germans, at first surprised that the Division had gone, moved in quickly to clear the shambles that was Oosterbeek. Most of the 300 men who were left on the river bank were rounded up and marched off, but some managed to evade capture by hiding in the woods. The Germans moved in cautiously to search the area, taking prisoner some airborne men still hiding in the shattered houses around. At Mevrouw Kate ter Horst’s white house near Oosterbeek Laag church daylight filtered through the shattered windows. Kate came up from the cellar and went to the front door. A German soldier was standing there. He told her that the British airborne troops had withdrawn during the night. Her garden was a shambles, branches everywhere; there were trenches and newly dug graves (after the war, when she and her husband returned, the graves of 57 men were found), smashed jeeps and guns and the dead lying in rows. When Mike Dauncey woke up he discovered that he had lost his own beret, so he got a paratrooper’s one instead. ‘There was shouting’ he recalled. ‘I realized that the enemy were with us.’ Kate Ter Horst went back into the cellar where the wounded waited and wondered. ‘I’m afraid that I have news for you’ she said. ‘Your comrades were evacuated across the river last night and the house is surrounded by Germans. An officer is waiting outside to speak to someone who is able to walk.’ Fred Moore volunteered and emerging from the front door, he was confronted by the officer, who saluted and said in impeccable English, ‘Your people have withdrawn back to their lines. I congratulate you on your efforts, but you are now our prisoners. Please distribute these gifts’. He gave Moore tins of cigarettes and bars of chocolate, obviously from the containers dropped outside the British lines. Then they brought out all the wounded from the Old Rectory, as well as many from other houses and collected them at the Concert Hall before taking them to the newly established ‘Airborne Hospital’ at Apeldoorn.
‘We were made to go outside’ says Dauncey. ‘The first thing that happened to me was that a German soldier took my wristwatch, much to my annoyance but I couldn’t do much about it. Things from now on were going to be different. After a few hours I was taken to a nearby house manned by nuns. I tried to walk but could not keep up so I was put on a stretcher. My mouth was beginning to swell and the medics gave me something to stop the infection. Nothing happened in the way of treatment and the following day we were taken further afield to a little known town called Apeldoorn, about ten miles away. I was with about thirty other British officers in a room there when a German intelligence officer came in and told us he was very worried about the fact that there were wounded British soldiers who had yet to be found and he wanted to know where they were. It is hard to forget the silence that greeted him. Not a word was said by anyone. I found myself next to an English officer who had come all the way from Argentina to fight for us. I was sad not to have seen Lieutenant Mike Bewley while in the barracks as, sadly, he died of his wounds.39
‘By this stage I still hadn’t had any treatment for my wounds and my condition was fast deteriorating. There was a hole in the lower part of my face and every time I drank anything the liquid just came out. It was an extraordinary sensation. Fortunately, our regimental padre happened to come in and saw me. To my delight I was sent to a local Dutch hospital, which gave me marvellous treatment.’
Following an operation, Dauncey and five other British soldiers were sent to an eye hospital in Utrecht, 40 miles away. ‘We were a motley bunch and only had four good eyes out of six people. Our reception at the Dutch eye hospital was absolutely incredible. The Dutch, instead of blaming us for spoiling their lovely towns and villages with our bombs and artillery, were remarkably grateful for our efforts. They said it gave them heart because they had had such a bitter time over the years. The care and concern of the nurses and the skill of the doctors was almost unbearable. I had two operations on my eye and they told me that it could remain but that it would be what he called a ‘reserve’ eye. In fact it survived remarkably well and it was only in 1998 that they had to remove it.
‘I raised the question of whether I should slip off with the head doctor who ran the place. ‘You must do what you think is right but you must realize that the hospital could possibly at worst be closed, or they might send the doctors to prison. The worst scenario would be that someone might be shot,’ he replie
d. From that point on I didn’t contemplate escape. It would have been a very poor response to the kindness and help that we had received from this Dutch eye hospital. I had to take my chance later. That moment would come when it was time for me to leave and go to a German prison hospital in Utrecht, where we were properly guarded.
‘Conditions were totally different to those at the eye hospital. We were all in one long corridor with beds running all along it. Only Major Gordon Cunningham of the 5th Black Watch, as the senior prisoner, was given a room to himself. Equipment was simple and supplies were limited. The only bandages I saw were paper ones and amputations were more widespread as often it was the only thing that could be done under such conditions. I asked if I could go for a little walk as I was feeling a little better and this gave me an opportunity to survey the wire fence surrounding the hospital. A number of us watched when the Germans went off for their supper each evening and began to develop a decent understanding of their guard rota. I had to act fast and so I decided to inform Gordon Cunningham about my plan to leave. I thought as senior officer he should know. He had been shot through both legs, but the bullets had missed his bones and gone straight out. Despite these wounds, he insisted that he should come as well. I agreed and that night we agreed that we would make our break the next evening at about half past six, when the German guards were having their supper. As we were one floor up, we couldn’t jump out of the window and so we decided to use the traditional method of knotting together various sheets. The concertina wire was very prickly, but such was the urgency neither one of us even noticed. We managed it with Gordon getting on my back as his legs were still very weak. A few moments later we were over the wire and in an absolutely deserted street. There was a curfew every night and absolutely no one was around.’
A Bridge Too Far Page 15