Arnhem

by William F Buckingham

  However good they might be, they were inclined to think that airborne was just another way of going into battle, whereas in fact the physical, mental and indeed spiritual problems were, when the battle might have to be fought without support from the normal army resources, very different.86

  The accuracy of this assessment with regard to Urquhart is clear from his plan, and especially the assumption that getting his Division assembled in its entirety was of equal importance to securing and holding the Division’s primary objective. As we shall see, Urquhart’s decision-making and behaviour once on the ground in Holland further confirmed the veracity of Frost’s assessment. These misconceptions ought to have been corrected by Urquhart’s senior subordinate commanders, but in practical terms they were little if any more experienced than Urquhart himself. This was arguably most apparent in the case of his senior brigade commander, Brigadier Gerald Lathbury, who had commanded the 1st Parachute Brigade in its attempt to seize the Primasole Bridge on Sicily in July 1943. That particular venture provided little more than an object lesson in how not to carry out an Airborne operation. Nonetheless, Lathbury went on to replicate the same errors in Holland and his plan for seizing the Arnhem bridges resembled a peacetime exercise even more than Urquhart’s Divisional scheme. To his credit, Urquhart had noted a tendency toward unwarranted overconfidence on taking command of the 1st Airborne Division that also drew comment from some of his Divisional officers.87 It was also noted by Sosabowski during a briefing for MARKET at Moor Park at 17:00 on 12 September:

  At the end Urquhart asked: ‘Any questions?’. Not one brigadier or unit commander spoke. I looked round, but most of them sat nonchalantly with legs crossed, looking rather bored and waiting for the conference to end. Questions were buzzing round my head, but I quickly sensed that if I started asking questions it would delay the end of the meeting; I would be unpopular with all of them and I did not think that it would be any use anyway.88

  To be fair, the assembled officer’s reticence might have been due in part to the presence of Browning at the briefing89 and to the ennui resulting from the series of cancelled missions that preceded MARKET. This was certainly Urquhart’s view90 and it was shared by others including Major Philip Tower from 1st Airborne Division’s Royal Artillery staff: ‘Even the most reluctant of us…who had seen so much fighting already at Dunkirk and in North Africa…were sick of all the cancellations and keen to go.’91 Nonetheless, that many harboured doubts was also clear from comments made at subsequent lower-level briefings. Lathbury appears to have warned Lieutenant-Colonel Frost that the upcoming battle would be ‘some bloodbath’, which Frost duly passed on to his 2nd Parachute Battalion officers.92 After briefing his 4th Parachute Brigade as a whole, Brigadier Hackett presciently informed his battalion commanders and a handful of key officers that they could ‘forget all that…Your hardest fighting and worst casualties will not be in defending the northern sector of the Arnhem perimeter, but in trying to get there.’93 This may have been the same occasion that Captain Nicholas Hanmer, Adjutant of the 10th Parachute Battalion, recalled Hackett predicting that his Battalion would be lucky to lose less than fifty per cent of its officer strength following a morale-boosting visit from Urquhart.94 Captain Eric Mackay, commanding A Troop, 1st Parachute Squadron RE, was so unhappy with the Divisional plan that he ordered his men to jump carrying a double scale of ammunition, and personally briefed his entire Troop on escape and evasion techniques.95 All this was now incidental, however. The die was cast and the 1st Airborne Division was embarking on its first and only full-scale airborne operation with Urquhart’s plan, whatever the reservations of his officers.

  With the 14 September briefback complete, the Division commanders were cleared to brief their subordinate commanders and authorise final preparations for Operation MARKET, although in some instances the ball was already rolling. The 1st Parachute Brigade held an O Group at the Brigade HQ at Syston on 13 September and issued an Intelligence Summary and Air Operation Order No.1 the same day, while the Brigade’s glider element was briefed by the Intelligence Officer at the airfields at Keevil and Tarrant Rushton on 15 September.96 The pilots of the Glider Pilot Regiment also appear to have been briefed at the same time. Staff-Sergeant Victor Miller from G Squadron recalled being confined to camp at RAF Fairford near Swindon on 15 September, and being briefed by the Squadron commander, Major Robert Croot. Miller and his co-pilot, Sergeant Tom Hollingsworth, then went on to familiarise themselves with their route and the layout of LZ Z, using the maps and aerial photographs issued to each glider crew. In addition, the two pilots had been designated to act as a PIAT team after landing, which obliged them to check and stow the weapon and nine rounds of ammunition in addition to their personal weapons.97 The morning of Saturday 16 September was spent loading a Jeep and trailer, possibly belonging to the 1st Airlanding Anti-Tank Battery RA, followed by additional briefings, during which Miller learned that he would also be carrying additional passengers. These included an unnamed colonel from 1st Airborne Division Signals, possibly Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Stephenson, a Major Oliver from the Army’s public relations office accompanied by a photographer sergeant named Harvey, Stanley Maxted from the BBC and Alan Wood from the Daily Express. Miller’s reaction was mixed. On the one hand he felt excited at carrying ‘such and interesting load’, but on the other was concerned that his passengers would be of no help in unloading the Horsa once on the ground.98

  The men of the 1st Parachute Battalion were allowed thirty-six hours’ leave from their billets in Grimsthorpe Castle and Bourne in Lincolnshire on 14 September, followed by a Battalion O Group at Lieutenant-Colonel David Dobie’s HQ at 20:00 on Friday 15 September. Troop briefings were held the following day, and one participant recalled the Battalion’s officers being unimpressed with the far-flung DZ and unsuccessfully volunteering en masse to jump on or adjacent to the Arnhem road bridge.99 The 2nd Parachute Battalion’s O Group at Stoke Rochford established that Major Digby Tatham-Warter’s A Company would lead the advance from the landing area.100 At the Battalion’s troop billets near Grantham, Private James Sims from Support Company had been informed that he and two other young soldiers had been struck from the operation, although they were not excused from preparations. Consequently, he spent a hot afternoon practising aircraft exit drills in a Nissen hut while weighed down with his loaded kitbag and other jump kit and equipment, owing to his Platoon Sergeant’s obsession with achieving a tight stick. In the event, Sims and his companions were placed back on the roster after three older soldiers appear to have decided that MARKET was another no-go and sneaked off for a night of drinking in nearby Nottingham.101 While Sims was being stood down and then up, his Battalion commander Lieutenant-Colonel Frost was packing the brass hunting horn he used to rally his men into his combat equipment and instructing his batman to pack his golf clubs and dinner jacket into his staff car in preparation for its despatch to Holland with the Battalion ground party.102 At Spalding a few miles to the south-east, Lieutenant-Colonel John Fitch’s 3rd Parachute Battalion were following the same general process after its stint assisting the local farmers, albeit slightly later. Fitch held his Battalion O Group on Friday 15 September, with troop briefings taking place the following day.103

  Generally speaking, British units were kept in their camps and billets until D-Day, when they were moved by road to the airfields from which they were to be despatched, although there was at least one officially sanctioned exception: the 2nd Parachute Battalion were shuttled in sealed trucks with a military police escort to a cinema in Grantham on the morning of Friday 15 September, where they were treated to a special screening of the 1941 comedy Hellzapoppin’, starring the American comedians Chic Johnson and Ole Olsen. According to Private James Sims, ‘It was the funniest film I’d ever seen in my life.’104 In contrast, US practice was to move units from their sometimes far-flung billets into accommodation on the airfields and carry out briefings and final preparations there. In most instances the accommodation was ten
ted, but the 401st Glider Infantry Regiment was housed at Aldermaston in an aircraft hangar fitted out with bunk beds.105 Not all units were billeted in their entirety, however. The 3rd Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment was lifted from Chilbolton near Winchester for example, while the remainder of the Regiment flew out of Aldermaston twenty miles or so to the north-east near Newbury.106 According to Gavin, the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions’ units were locked down in such camps by nightfall on Friday 15 September.107 Not everyone appreciated the process. Private James Allardyce, who moved from billets in the grounds of Wollaton Park in Nottingham with the rest of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, recalled feeling like a prisoner within the British-guarded barbed wire that surrounded his temporary home, and being unable to shake off the gloomy feeling that he and his comrades ‘were like condemned men waiting to be led off’.108

  It is unclear where Private Allardyce was incarcerated, but it was likely one of the airfields belonging to the 313th or 316th Troop Carrier Groups at Cottesmore or Folkingham in Lincolnshire, or possibly one of the 50th Troop Carrier Wings’ three airfields in Nottinghamshire.109 Much of Saturday 16 September appears to have been taken up with troop briefings. The commander of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s 3rd Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Louis G. Mendez, used one briefing to register his dissatisfaction with the USAAF performance in Normandy, where only eight sticks of his Battalion unit were delivered onto the correct DZ. The remainder were scattered up to fifteen miles astray and in an effort to prevent a recurrence Mendez addressed the aircrew present: ‘Prior to Normandy, I had the finest combat-ready force of its size …By the time I gathered them together in Normandy, half were gone. I charge you: put us down in Holland or put us down in hell, but put us all down together in one place.’110

  Not everyone was impressed with the operation as revealed at the briefings. Private John Garzia, who had participated in three combat jumps, thought it ‘sheer insanity’, while Staff Sergeant Russell O’Neal and Private First Class John Allen, also three-jump veterans, were more concerned with the daylight drop; the former included his fears in a letter home while Allen, who was still recovering from wounds sustained in Normandy, was convinced that the Germans would not be able to miss him in daylight. Private Leo Hart, on the other hand, remained convinced that the operation would be cancelled because of a rumour that 4,000 SS troops were stationed in the area of the DZ. The rumour may well have originated with Private Philip H. Nadler from the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, in an additional and somewhat unusual attempt to inject some levity into proceedings; when his platoon commander had revealed a model of the Battalion objective labelled ‘Grave’, Nadler quickly responded: ‘Yeah, we know that, Lieutenant, but what country are we droppin’ on?’ Major Edward N. Wellems, commanding the 508th Regiment’s 2nd Battalion, noted another briefer referring to the ‘Gravy’ bridge, presumably for the same reason.111

  Matters proceeded in a similar vein 100 miles to the south-west, where the 101st Airborne Division was ensconced on six airfields belonging to the 53rd Troop Carrier Wing at Aldermaston, Chilbolton, Greenham Common, Membury, Ramsbury and Welford, located west, south and east of Newbury in Berkshire. Sergeant George Kosimaki from Division HQ referred in his diary to being briefed on 15 September, and to being issued ammunition and Dutch currency the following day at Greenham Common.112 At Ramsbury the barbed wire and armed guards also gave Corporal Hansford Vest of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment feelings of incarceration; as Ramsbury was given over exclusively to glider serials, he was presumably part of the 502nd Regiment’s glider-borne Jeep lift. If so, he was accompanied by the 502nd’s chaplain, Captain Raymond S. Hall, who, much to his chagrin, was medically barred from jumping because of wounds suffered in Normandy. Like most paratroopers, Hall considered gliders to be unsafe in the extreme.113 First Sergeant Daniel Zapalski from the 502nd Regiment’s 3rd Battalion at Greenham Common was also recovering from a leg wound sustained in Normandy, but had better luck in circumventing authority. Banned from jumping by his Battalion commander Lieutenant-Colonel Robert G. Cole, Zapalski had sought out written confirmation of his combat-worthiness from the Regimental surgeon. Cole responded by accusing him of being ‘a fatheaded Polack, impractical, burdensome and unreasonable’ but allowed the medical verdict to stand. Zapalski thus jumped into Holland with his Battalion.114 Like many of his comrades, Private Donald R. Burgett of the 1st Battalion 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment had become jaded by ‘sixteen false alarms and three dry runs’, but his opinion changed on being served a full fried chicken dinner with all the trimmings followed by ice cream soon after arrival at a large tented camp at Chiseldon near Membury. Burgett noted that he had received the same superior USAAF rations immediately prior to jumping into Normandy.115 Private William J. Stone, part of a forward observer team from Battery B, 321st Glider Field Artillery Battalion attached to the 3rd Battalion 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, made the same connection at Chilbolton on 16 September on being served a steak dinner followed by fruit cocktail, ‘a delicacy in the ETO and when it and steak – which never made our menu – were served, while I wouldn’t say that we were being fattened up for the slaughter, the air did take on an ominous quality. My feeling was reinforced when the C-47s began landing as dinner was ending. Those pilots wanted their share of the steak and fruit cocktail.’116 Private Burgett also noted that the briefing that followed the fried chicken dinner was notably short in comparison with those back in May and June, with just a few maps and none of the detailed discussion, aerial photographs and sand table models employed in the run-up to the D-Day drop.117

  By the evening of Saturday 16 September the briefings and preparations were largely complete. Staff Sergeant Miller of the Glider Pilot Regiment visited a well-patronised Sergeant’s Mess at Fairford, although he drank little so as to be clear-headed for the morning.118 Having adapted to his new role of lugging sixty pounds of mortar bombs, Private Sims spent the evening in the Other Ranks canteen at Grantham petting a cat that had attached itself to the 2nd Parachute Battalion, while somewhere nearby Sergeant Francis Moncur amassed a large pile of Guilders playing blackjack with his issued Dutch currency.119 At Ruskington near Sleaford, the commander of the 1st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron, Major Gough, celebrated his forty-third birthday by visiting his parachute contingent in their billets. The Squadron’s glider contingent, consisting of thirty-one armed Jeeps under the Squadron’s second-in-command, Captain David Allsop, was ensconced with its gliders and Halifax tugs at Tarrant Rushton in Dorset. According to an eyewitness the mood was quiet and a little sceptical, as part of the Squadron had actually been airborne when a previous operation had been cancelled.120 At least some of the Pathfinders from the 21st Independent Parachute Company based at nearby Newark were in higher spirits; Corporal Alan Sharman was coated green by a smoke flare ignited by one of his men as a joke, and spent much of the remainder of the night scrubbing off the dye. Some succeeded in circumventing the lock-down order. A number of men from the 1st Parachute Brigade’s Signal Section repaired to the Plough Hotel in Syston village, and some members of the 1st Airlanding Anti-Tank Battery appear to have visited a public house in Tarrant Rushton.121 Many appear to have shared the Reconnaissance Squadron’s opinion that the Operation would be cancelled at the last minute. They were wrong.

  Brereton had taken the decision to launch MARKET at 19:00 that evening, after receiving a favourable long-range weather forecast. H-Hour, the point at which the 1st Allied Airborne Army would begin to land on Dutch soil, was set for 13:00 in the afternoon of Sunday 17 September 1944.122 While the rank and file were not aware of this, their superiors were, for Brereton had made his decision known at a final high-level meeting convened by Browning in the early evening of 16 September.123

  5

  D-Day 00:01 to 14:30

  Sunday 17 September 1944

  While the men of the 1st Allied Airborne Army were counting down the hours to take-off, their air force counterpart
s were laying the groundwork for Operation MARKET. During the night RAF Bomber Command sent between 223 and 282 aircraft to strike an anti-aircraft battery and four Luftwaffe fighter airfields in a position to interfere with the MARKET fly-in.1 One of the airfields was recently occupied by a unit equipped with the new Messerschmitt 262 jet fighters, and the bombing cratered the runways sufficiently badly to prevent flying operations.2 Two Avro Lancasters failed to return from the strike against the anti-aircraft battery, and may have collided after delivering their load; there were no survivors and the fourteen RAF and RCAF aircrew from RAF Nos. 90 and 115 Squadrons thus became the first casualties of Operation MARKET GARDEN.3 With the coming of daylight a further twenty-three Mosquitoes and 200 Lancasters bombed German anti-aircraft positions along the Dutch coast, paying particular attention to three coastal batteries on the island of Walcheren in the mouth of the River Scheldt. Shortly thereafter the US 8th Air Force joined the fray, despatching up to 852 B-17 bombers to deliver 3,139 tons of ordnance on a fifth airfield and 117 German anti-aircraft positions along the fly-in route; the attack cost a further two B-17s and three escorting fighters lost.4 While this was going on, the Continent-based British 2nd Tactical Air Force struck targets inland, including German barracks at Arnhem, Cleve, Ede and Nijmegen, followed by 212 fighter-bombers from the US 9th Air Force that attacked the anti-aircraft positions hit earlier by the B-17s. In all, the Allied air forces flew 1,395 bomber and 1,240 fighter sorties during the night of 16 September and morning of the following day.5

  With take-offs scheduled to begin after 09:00, those so inclined were able to get a full night’s sleep. In what was likely the case across the board, the Glider Pilots and RAF aircrew at Fairford were roused by an orderly at 05:00. After shaving in cold water Staff-Sergeant Victor Miller from the Glider Pilot Regiment’s G Squadron enjoyed a breakfast that featured bacon and two fresh eggs rather than the usual powdered variety, during which he was joined by his co-pilot Sergeant Tom Hollingsworth; being bleary eyed and dishevelled, Hollingsworth does not appear to have imitated Miller’s abstemious behaviour the previous evening. Breakfast was followed by a last-minute briefing with the RAF tug crews, which confirmed the previous day’s fine weather forecast and thus that MARKET was on.6 According to Miller the weather at Fairford was clear but at Membury, twenty miles or so to the south, Private Donald Burgett of the 1st Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment stared out into thick fog while enjoying a breakfast of bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, toast, orange marmalade, fruit and coffee.7