Deane-Drummond had not remained a prisoner for very long. Taken back to Arnhem, he watched his opportunity and made off while other parachutists were being rounded up. The refuge he chose was the nearest house, which proved to his misfortune to be some kind of German headquarters. He had just time to bolt into a large, strongly made Dutch cupboard before some SS officers entered the room and began to interrogate a number of prisoners including Staff Sergeant George Betts of the Glider Pilot Regiment who later smuggled water and bread to him. Betts had been hit in the thigh and foot by a mortar explosion that had blown his companion, a young paratrooper, to smithereens. He had crawled to the cellar of the house where he found himself with a Dutch couple and their frightened young daughter. The woman mopped his wounds with a scrap of petticoat but when he heard a German voice shouting ‘Kommen out Tommy’ from the top of the cellar steps he knew that the Dutchman had betrayed him to the Germans.43 Deane-Drummond spent twelve days in that cupboard, with nothing to eat but pieces of bread and nothing to drink but the contents of his water bottle. At long last, another chance came and he slipped away and hid in the garden, being by this time, as he reports, ‘not a little exhausted.’
‘I was brought by Red Cross lorry from Arnhem’ recalled Deane-Drummond ‘and where the road to Ede passed through a forest we were dropped off and led to a clearing with a small hut. To my astonishment it was surrounded by about thirty British soldiers. Some were sorting out equipment, while others were cooking up some water and all exchanging stories. Inside the hut were another twenty men and a high old stench of unwashed bodies wafted out of the door as I looked in. Tony Hibbert recognized me and let out a cheer. The others had thought that we were Dutchmen, dressed as we were in old civilian clothes. It was wonderful to hear that we were at last getting somewhere.’ He remained a further three weeks on the wrong side of the Lower Rhine until at last he, too, got safely away.44
Resistance guides led the evaders on foot or bicycle through the woods and along the roads to a central rendezvous point in the woods about 1½ miles north of the river (marked RV on map). Arms and ammunition, which had been stored at the Oranje Nassau Oord barn, had been taken to the RV by Jan Peelen using a bicycle with a front load carrier. Lieutenant Gilbert Kirschen, Belgian SAS, had arranged for arms and uniforms to be dropped by parachute to re-equip the men, many of whom were dressed in civilian clothes. Captain Tom Wainwright of the 156th Parachute Battalion and Sergeant Major Bob Grainger of the 10th Parachute Battalion were approached by Major Tatham-Warter to undertake a reconnaissance mission along the Rhine to find a suitable crossing point and a route to it. CSM Grainger had gone into hiding in the Ede area but he was intensely claustrophobic and so his initial accommodation, which compelled him to spend 18 hours each day lying in a human-sized trench in the ground, covered with a lid topped with earth, did not suit him at all. It was only a chink of daylight and an incredible display of willpower that enabled him to endure it. After four days, however, he was taken away to Berkelaan 16, a cottage next to the German barracks in Ede, which was much more satisfactory. One day he was walking through the streets of Ede in company with Geraldine Nijhoff, whose mother owned the house, when a group of airborne prisoners were marched by. In frustration, he kicked the wheel of a parked motorbike, which, to the horror of all, promptly fell over. He hastily picked it up while Geraldine apologised to the angry German despatch rider who owned it.
On 17 October, guided by Menno de Nooij, Grainger and Captain Tom Wainwright reconnoitred in the Wageningen area. They reported back that there was quite a concentration of German troops and they all seemed alert; so it was decided to try further to the east, nearer to Renkum. On 20 October they were led by Maarten van den Bent to Oranje Nassau Oord, where nearby in a barn Jan Peelen was waiting. As it was strictly a military operation Wainwright and Grainger on their own then successfully reconnoitred another route (which had been suggested by ‘Flip’ van der Pol) to the river and then westwards along the river flats. Although a number of German posts were noted on either side, it was decided later at ‘Brigade HQ’ to use this route.45
With Lathbury in hiding in Ede were some of his officers, Majors Tony Hibbert and Digby Tatham-Warter, Lieutenant Colonel David Dobie and Captain Tony Frank, who had escaped after the fighting at the bridge ended. Wounded in the ankle by shelling on Wednesday 20th September, Captain Frank was taken prisoner on the following day when British resistance finally collapsed and then sent to the St. Elizabeth Hospital for treatment. With him was Major Tatham-Warter, who was similarly slightly wounded and made it plain that he had no intention of being a prisoner for longer than was necessary. That night the two of them got out of bed, put on their clothes, climbed down from a first floor window, crawled through the hospital gardens and finally reached the railway line a mile to the west of the hospital where, quite exhausted, they halted until dawn. As it grew light they noticed a farmhouse some distance away and, eager to obtain some food, they watched it for some time before Tatham-Warter decided to knock on the door. The lady who owned the property took them in, fed them a meal of eggs and cheese which they eagerly devoured and put them to rest in the loft of a barn. Having slept until the afternoon, they were roused by Menno de Nooy of the Ede Resistance, who took them into his care. They were taken to a farm in the small Warnsborn forest, where they lived in a secret compartment in a shed, though in the evenings they emerged to play cards with the farmer and cut home-grown tobacco for cigarettes. It soon became clear that several hundred airborne personnel were in hiding around the Ede area and the Resistance were having trouble in concealing and administrating such numbers. Tatham-Warter, having established contact with Brigadier Lathbury, Lieutenant Colonel Dobie and Major Hibbert to name but a few, effectively took charge and began to organise the evaders into a sort of coup-de-main force to spearhead any attempt by the 2nd British Army to cross the Rhine. When it became clear that there would be no such attempt, efforts were made to arrange for the withdrawal of this force to the Allied lines.
Brigadier ‘Shan’ Hackett, after a period of recuperation, had managed to escape from St. Elizabeth Hospital with the help of the Dutch underground. Although he was still seriously wounded and unfit to be moved, the Germans were about to move him to a PoW camp. He was taken by ‘Piet van Arnhem’, a resistance worker from Ede and driven to Ede. They were stopped on the way but Hackett had extra bloody bandages applied, to make him look even worse than he was. Piet told the checkpoint that they were taking him to hospital. They were let through despite the hospital being in the opposite direction, from which they had just come. He was hidden by a Dutch family called de Nooij who lived at No. 5 Torenstraat in Ede. The de Nooij family nursed the brigadier back to health over a period of several months and he then managed to escape again with the help of the underground.46
Tony Hibbert’s experience as a prisoner of war lasted only days. At 1730 on Saturday 23rd, having being held at the temporary PoW camp at Velp, he and other captured officers were transported in an open lorry towards Munich.
‘I was in the last group to leave - our lorry was a three-tonner, open, with sideboards about three feet high and thirty of us, mostly officers, were crammed into it, along with two old Luftwaffe guards armed with pistols and rifles. There was a third guard with a Schmeisser on the front mudguard. The lorry tore off at about 60 mph, which was obviously intended to prevent us hopping off in transit. We continued to give the V sign to the Dutch as well as the odd German and every time we did this, the corporal on the mudguard lost his temper and stopped the lorry to tell us he’d shoot us if we did it again. But we carried on playing the fool, because every time we stopped it took some time for the lorry to build up speed again and this was the opportunity we were waiting for. We stopped for a third time for the usual tirade and I winked to Dennis Munford that we’d make a jump for it when the lorry got going again. I asked Pat Barnett next to me to keep the nearest guard busy and pulled myself over the side as the lorry started, the guard shouting
, ‘Nein, nein!’ I hit the road fairly hard but nothing seemed broken though there seemed a lot of blood flowing. Dennis was caught by the corporal’s machine gun as he climbed over a wall, while I made a dash for the nearest side-turning, zigzagging to avoid the bullets and crashing straight through the wooden fence at the end, Donald-Duck style. Then I zipped through half a dozen gardens and decided to go to ground until it got dark. I covered myself with logs in a small garden hut and listened to the weapons still firing in the streets and the shouts of the search party. The noise eventually-died down and, after a long time, I heard the lorry move off. My plan was to get well outside the town [Brummen] and approach a small farmhouse and try to find out where I was, get news of our troops and how to contact the underground.’
Munford set off in the opposite direction but was dragged out form his hiding place under a chicken shed and soon recaptured. The tragedy of this escape attempt was that immediately after they had jumped one of the German guards in the truck panicked and turned his Schmeisser on the other men in the lorry. A German soldier and four airborne men were killed outright, while a further two were mortally wounded. Amongst the dead was Major Tony Cotterell the WAR reporter.47
Meanwhile, rapidly weaving a random path over fences, through gardens and down alleyways, Hibbert successfully evaded recapture, partly thanks to an unknown Dutchman who discreetly tracked the Brigade Major’s progress and twice alerted him to the imminent presence of German soldiers by whistling ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. The first time Hibbert heard this completely unexpected tune it naturally made him stop dead in his tracks. He hid and the appearance of a German staff car minutes later revealed to him that if he had carried on in the direction he was heading he would have stumbled into a German Headquarters. Having obtained a pair of rubber gym shoes at Velp in exchange for his ‘noisy’ army boots, Hibbert was able to move somewhat more covertly and with German troops searching the surrounding countryside for him, Hibbert took refuge in woodland. With some apples he had stolen from an orchard, he moved on and after he had gone what he thought was about two or three miles he found a small isolated farmhouse. ‘I pulled hard at the bell and tapped on the window’ recalled Hibbert ‘and eventually a small circular window in the wall slid open and a very suspicious man stuck his head out and shone a torch on me. I felt conspicuous in the torchlight and retreated hastily behind a bush while trying to convince him in German, French and English that I was a British soldier and would be very grateful for their help. I was wearing a groundsheet and my face was covered in blood and bruises and dirt so the glimpse he’d had of me can’t have been very reassuring. It soon became clear I wasn’t getting through and I left. I heard later that he thought I was a German deserter. When he heard the next day that I was a bona fide Englishman he burst into tears and spent the rest of the day bicycling about looking for me.’
Hibbert burrowed his way into the earth beneath a log pile and slept until morning. Unfortunately his shelter collapsed during the night, leaving him bruised, cut and dazed. In addition to these injuries the pain was such in his back that he had difficulty walking, his knees were still weak after his leap from the lorry, his face was bloodied from the resulting landing and one of his one eyes was bruised and shut.
Hibbert rested himself further during the day and after dusk decided to knock on the door of the farmhouse. The farmer was suspicious of Hibbert, but he was eventually convinced that he was an escaped British officer after several attempts to convey his identity; once by drawing a Union Jack and a Swastika on a piece of paper and then crossing out the latter. The farmer departed to find someone who could speak English while his wife prepared sandwiches and a large pot of coffee for their guest. During the course of the next day a succession of curious locals visited the farm and they were finally followed by a representative of the resistance. Dick Tjeenk Willink verified Hibbert’s identity by means of a short but thorough interrogation, at the end of which he offered him shelter at his house in Brummen. The house was well equipped with hiding places; a fake floor in the attic where a man could lie on a mattress and a double partitioned wall behind a cupboard, behind either of which Hibbert could conceal himself at a moment’s notice. He stayed here for three weeks.
Before long it came to the attention of Brigadier Lathbury, who was also in hiding and with the help of the Dutch Resistance was in touch with most all airborne men on the run, that his Brigade Major was alive and in a house not more than half a mile from where he was based, in Ede, 15 miles west of Arnhem. The pair were delighted to be reunited and they, with the help of Major Tatham-Warter and Lieutenant Colonel Dobie, began the action of reassembling the evading remnants of the 1st Airborne Division behind enemy lines. By this time Hibbert had acquired some replacement clothing but had spared no thought for the overall ensemble and so struck an unusual figure in green plus-fours that hung below his calves, white stockings, gym shoes and a grey and white chequered coat. Yet open movement about the area in such peculiar attire drew little attention as the local population were at the stage where they had to accept what clothes they could find. Originally it had been planned that these airborne men would act as a coup-de-main cum commando force for any further Allied attempt to cross the Rhine. However when it became clear that this was not going to happen there was no option but to plan for the mass escape of these men, now numbering in the hundreds.
Brigadier Lathbury and his officers, with the Resistance leaders, first collected the evaders from their dispersed hides and then to pass them over the river to safety. The crossing, which was named Operation ‘Pegasus’, was planned for the night of 23/24 October, but on the 20th the Germans ordered the complete evacuation of Bennekom by the 22nd. This was tragic for the villagers, but the confusion that it would cause would provide cover for the movement of the evaders to the river. It was therefore decided to bring forward the date for the operation to the night of 22/23 October. Tatham-Warter, the bold ring leader of the mass-escape of these personnel back to the Allied lines, spoke with Tony Hibbert the day before to inform him that he was to command the party at the rear of their withdrawal, comprising those men in hiding around Velp. From here, he and his sixty men would be taken to Oud Reemst, from where they would commandeer two trucks, each designed only to accommodate 10 men and drive them to Renkum, where they would unload and proceed to the river bank on foot. Hibbert being, like most men, more cautious than Tatham-Warter, feared that the idea of moving 120 men to the Rhine through heavy German defences would most likely fail, however he was aware that there was little else to be done. Dutiful as ever, Hibbert hollowed out the heel of his boot and placed inside a list of all those who had been taken prisoner at Arnhem bridge, as well as plans of German gun emplacements in the local area.
Hibbert set up his headquarters outside of Oud Reemst, inside a hut in a wooded clearing. Throughout the day his men began to assemble, all wearing at least parts of a British uniform and a number of them were armed. After dark, two Chevrolet trucks were delivered, though the patchwork surgery that had been carried out on them over the years ensured that they bore little resemblance to the time when they had rolled off the production line. Hibbert decided that there was only one way to fit 30 men into each vehicle and that was for half of them to lie on the floor and act as a sort of cushion for the officers and other ranks who would carry arms. Needless to say no one volunteered for the static role, there were arguments but these were all forgotten when, for no known reason, several bursts of machine-gun fire were heard nearby. It took three hours for them to reach their destination, by which time those who had lay down in the trucks were both bruised and fed up. At 1930, as the group assembled on the track and were preparing to move off, two German soldiers approached on bicycles, each carrying a Schmeisser. Claiming right of way, they furiously rang the bells on their bikes for the British to clear the road, which in a state of shock they were happy to do and the two Germans rode straight passed them and disappeared into the woods beyond. Hibbert organize
d his group into single file sections and, led by a guide, they proceeded towards the river bank. Surprised that they had got as far as they had, Hibbert expected a German patrol to ambush them at any moment, however ‘Pegasus’ was a complete success and all of the men were evacuated without alerting the enemy.
‘On the other ‘side’ recalled Tony Hibbert ‘we were ferried away by jeeps along a road parallel to the water, I volunteered to sit right on the front bonnet to guide the driver as, of course, there were no lights. We were going fairly fast when the driver went slap into another jeep coming from the opposite direction. I moved my legs and feet at some considerable speed or they would have been chopped off at the knee. As it was, I just .raised them in time, did a triple somersault, landed in the road and bust my leg and spent the next three months in hospital. So a thoroughly unsatisfactory battle ended in a thoroughly unsatisfying anticlimax.’48
Lathbury and Tatham-Warter proceeded to the embarkation area on bicycles, passing as many as two hundred German soldiers on the way. Despite his fears that they would be caught, they were not challenged and so both of them made it across the Rhine to the Allied lines, taking with them 136 other men. While he had been in the St. Elizabeth Hospital, Lathbury had met his badly wounded colleague, Brigadier Hackett, who gave him a detailed report on the battle, including recommendations for valour awards and these Lathbury took with him across the Rhine.49
Brigadier Gerald Lathbury recalled: ‘I shall never forget the journey to the RV. Digby and I cycled along the road side by side and every time we saw a German and we passed at least 200, some in groups, some in platoons marching along, I expected to be challenged, but nothing untoward happened. We had chosen as a RV a large wood, which seemed to be filled with German gun positions, but it was thick enough to give us a chance of concealment., finally we were all assembled between two gun positions 500 yards on either side of us.’
A Bridge Too Far Page 19