Arnhem
Page 37
The paratroopers noted a thinning of the throng the closer they drew to the bridge, and the reason soon emerged. The Keizer Lodewijkplein traffic circle lay just south of two areas of parkland called the Hunnerpark and Valkhofpark, the former straddling the Arnhemscheweg leading onto the bridge and the latter containing sections of Nijmegen’s medieval defences, and it was here that Oberst Henke’s scratch force of reserve and training personnel had dug in to protect the Waal road bridge. Two 20mm and one 88mm FlaK guns assigned to protect the south end of the bridges from air attack were integrated into the defences and more formal artillery support was organised by Hauptsturmführer Oskar Schwappacher, the commander of SS Artillerie Ausbildungs und Ersatz Regiment 5. This involved establishing links with 10 SS Panzer Division’s artillery and redeploying the large calibre FlaK guns on the north bank of the River Waal closer to the water’s edge to allow them to fire across the river. Schwappacher also took on the role of forward observer in person after walking the ground to familiarise himself with the defensive perimeter, which stretched for almost a mile between the Keizer Lodewijkplein and to the south-west the Keizer Karel Plein.49 Henke had received no direct reinforcements at this point apart from the vanguard of the detachment from SS Panzer Pionier Bataillon 10 the previous evening as Sturmbannführer Reinhold had deployed his scratch force of dismounted tank crewman from SS Panzer Regiment 10 as a backstop on the north bank of the Waal, although more substantial support was on the way.
Responsibility for removing the British force blocking passage over the Arnhem road bridge and defending the Waal bridges was allotted to Brigadeführer Harmel when he reported to II SS Panzerkorps HQ on his return from Berlin early in the morning of 18 September. With responsibility for the Waal crossings at Nijmegen temporarily devolved to Sturmbannführer Reinhold, Harmel concentrated upon dealing with the British enclave in Arnhem and channelling his Division across the Lower Rhine from a tactical HQ near Pannerden, approximately fifteen miles south-east of Arnhem. The channelling employed two ferry sites, although it is unclear if these were functioning prior to 17 September or were set up in response to the loss of the crossings at Arnhem. The smaller was located at Huissen, ten kilometres or so upstream from Arnhem and the larger at Pannerden, where Hauptsturmführer Albert Brandt’s SS Panzer Pionier Bataillon 10 employed anything capable of carrying troops, vehicles and equipment over the river. They commandeered canal barges, motor boats, rowing skiffs and even rubber dinghies. According to one account a Panzer IV was manhandled across on an improvised raft using ropes and poles, although subsequently Harmel was able to arrange use of a purpose-built, forty-tonne ferry capable of moving tanks and assault guns from a Heer pioneer unit.50 The remainder of Untersturmführer Werner Baumgärtel’s detachment from SS Panzer Pionier Bataillon 10 appear to have been among the first to cross, travelling in trucks augmented with commandeered bicycles. On arrival at Nijmegen Baumgärtel’s men set about rigging the road and rail bridges for demolition and helping improve the field defences south of the road bridge.51
Apart from the interference of the ecstatic Dutch civilians, Company G’s initial advance through Nijmegen was largely unopposed for the first 500 yards or so after the field hospital. At that point the paratroopers came under ‘intense sniper fire,’ which scattered the civilian onlookers and prompted Captain Wilde to sidestep to the right with the remainder of the Company while Greenwalt’s platoon provided covering fire, and the latter subsequently overran a partially completed German roadblock while moving forward to deal with the snipers, killing seven Germans.52 The roadblock was presumably part of an outpost line ordered by Oberst Henke and the dead may therefore have been from Untersturmführer Baumgärtel’s SS Pionier detachment. In the meantime Wilde and the other two platoons closed to within approximately 200 yards of the road bridge before coming under small-arms fire from the German troops dug in around the Keizer Lodewijkplein at approximately 10:00. Manoeuvring forward into the increasingly heavy fire, Wilde’s men pushed forward another hundred yards before attempting a charge, but this failed in the face of direct fire from 20mm and 88mm guns and artillery fire called down by Hauptsturmführer Schwappacher. The paratroopers nonetheless continued to work their way through to the buildings at the edge of the Keizer Lodewijkplein, but could proceed no further; one group managed to reach the riverbank just east of the bridge with the assistance of a Dutch Resistance member called Agardus Leegsma but were then driven back to the main company location.53
While all this was going reinforcements were filtering into Oberst Henke’s defensive line at the southern end of the Nijmegen crossings, as ordered by Heeresgruppe B almost twenty-four hours earlier. Hauptsturmführer Karl-Heinz Euling had spent the night and early morning disentangling his unit from the fight at the Arnhem road bridge an element at a time, and after regrouping crossed the Lower Rhine via the ferry at Huissen, travelling in a number of armoured half-tracks again augmented with locally commandeered bicycles. Once across the Lower Rhine Euling moved via Elst to the north end of the Nijmegen road bridge, arriving at around midday. There he had a hurried meeting with local commander Sturmbannführer Leo Reinhold, who ordered Euling to cross the Waal and deploy his Kampfgruppe to defend the immediate approaches to the southern end of the road and rail bridges.54 Euling promptly took his half-tracks across the road bridge and established a Command Post just to the west in the Valkhofpark, the highest point in the city. The unarmoured portion of his unit were ferried across the river in rubber dinghies in order to avoid casualties from Allied small arms and mortar fire, although the source of such fire is uncertain, given that the US units in Nijmegen do not appear to have been in direct sight of the bridge or to have had mortar or artillery support. The German defences were augmented over the course of the day with four Sturmgeschütze III and up to a dozen Panzer IV tanks from Reinhold’s unit, II Bataillon SS Panzer Regiment 10, which crossed the Lower Rhine via the Pannerden ferry. Reinhold also had some of the 88mm FlaK guns emplaced on the north bank of the Waal re-sited to deliver direct fire on the bridges.55
It is unclear if Captain Wilde and his men were aware of the arrival of the SS reinforcements, but by midday it was apparent that they lacked the strength to fight through and secure the bridge without reinforcement. The problem was that there were no reinforcements to hand, due largely to the size of the 82nd Airborne Division’s area of responsibility. Lieutenant-Colonel Mendez could not spare more men from the 3rd Battalion without jeopardising the defence of the eastern side of the Groesbeek Heights and the 508th Regiment’s sole reserve, Captain Frank Schofield’s Company C from the 1st Battalion, had already been despatched elsewhere by Colonel Lindquist. Consideration was given to deploying part of the Divisional reserve, the 2nd Battalion 505th Regiment, but the idea was abandoned, presumably because the 505th Regiment had enough on its hands.56 Captain Wilde and the men of Company G were therefore left to their own devices occupying buildings along the edge of the Keizer Lodewijkplein, while events back at the landing area took a dramatic turn.
While Company G had been feeling its way into the eastern suburbs of Nijmegen, the south-eastern section of the 82nd Airborne Division’s perimeter had come under attack from 406 z.b.V. Division, the scratch force commanded by Generalleutnant Scherbening formed by combing Wehrkreis IV of personnel from NCO schools, replacement and training depots, medically downgraded rear-echelon units and Luftwaffe training establishments. In all this effort mustered a force of around 3,500 men equipped with 130 assorted machine-guns, twenty-four mortars and a number of light flak guns, divided into four kampfgruppen. Support was provided by five armoured cars and three 20mm armed half-tracks integrated into one of the battlegroups and the equivalent of three artillery batteries deployed in the area north-east of Wyler. This was an impressive host given the prevailing conditions, but the vast majority lacked even basic infantry training and there was a chronic shortage of motorised transport, communications equipment and even field kitchens.57 The attackers were deployed
on an attack frontage of around six miles, running through the edge of the Reichswald forest south of Groesbeek before curving north-east past Kranenburg, where Scherbening had established his tactical HQ.
The German attack thus straddled the section of the US perimeter held by the 505th and 508th Parachute Infantry Regiments. The former was deployed along a six- to seven-mile frontage, with Major Talton W. Long’s 1st Battalion holding the high ground running east from Mook on the River Waal to Bisselt. Major James L. Kaiser’s 3rd Battalion held the eastern portion of the line curving north-east through the southern edge of Groesbeek. As the 3rd Battalion’s frontage was too wide to maintain a continuous line, Kaiser’s men were deployed in small detachments covering road junctions and villages to the south of Groesbeek facing the German border and the Reichswald forest.58 Their key mission was to protect the landing area for the 82nd Airborne Division’s second lift, which was originally scheduled to arrive at 10:00 on 18 September; fortuitously as it turned out, Gavin was informed at 08:40 that the lift had been postponed until 13:00 owing to fog over some of the airfields in England.59 Responsibility for protecting the southernmost of the adjoining landing zones, codenamed LZ N, was allotted to the 3rd Battalion’s Company I, which occupied the villages of Breedeweg, Bruuk and Grafwegen along its southern edge. The northern LZ T was covered by 1st Lieutenant Norman MacVicar’s Company D from the 508th Parachute Infantry, which had been detached when the remainder of the Regiment moved north to De Ploeg in the late afternoon of 17 September; as with the 505th Regiment, a single company was all that could be spared because of the number of missions allotted to the 508th Regiment; Lieutenant MacVicar was also tasked to protect Lieutenant Kenneth L. Johnson and four men from the Regimental Supply Section as they gathered in equipment bundles and established a central supply dump alongside the Company Command Post, using a cart and team of horses commandeered from a nearby farm.60 Given the distances involved, the idea was for the US units to act as a warning tripwire to delay the attackers while reinforcements were organised, rather than a blocking force per se.61
The German attack began as scheduled just after first light at 06:30, although it does not appear to have been immediately apparent to their opponents because of the attacker’s infiltration tactics and the dispersed nature of the American deployments; as one US participant put it, ‘the [German] attack developed slowly at first and appeared to be only a series of patrol actions’.62 This is apparent from the experience of the 508th Regiment’s Company D, which was likely the first US unit to encounter the attackers in numbers. After spending the night dug in on the ridge overlooking LZ T from the west, Lieutenant MacVicar summoned his Platoon leaders soon after first light and ordered them to redeploy to three new locations spread along the eastern side of the landing area. The move may have been prompted by the news of the second lift being postponed until the early afternoon, given that it was mentioned during the briefing. However, the redeployment extended the Company frontage to over a mile and located the platoon locations 1,000 yards or more from the Company command post. This had obvious implications for MacVicar’s ability to maintain contact with or exercise control over his platoons, together with the shortage of field telephone lines and other equipment that obliged reliance on hand-held SCR 536 radios or runners for communication; with the exception of one SCR 300 set and a single SCR 536, all of Company HQ’s communication equipment had been lost when the C-47 carrying the Company Executive Officer and Communication Sergeant was shot down before reaching the jump point.63
Matters went awry almost from the outset. Lieutenant Robert L. Sickler’s 3rd Platoon was digging in to cover the southern end of LZ T after establishing contact with the 505th Regiment on the right flank when MacVicar ordered him to take two of his Squads and move to the 2nd Platoon’s location near Voxhill at the other end of the line, via the Company command post, for further instructions; contact with the other two Platoons had been lost after some scattered shooting from the direction of Voxhill and a cryptic SCR 536 transmission referring to trouble and needing help. MacVicar accompanied Sickler and his men for half the distance with the Company SCR 536 and a runner, at which point he despatched the runner to contact the 1st Platoon and remained in place, presumably in an effort to stay within range of the SCR 536. The remainder of the patrol continued across the Wyler road and a field planted with sugar beet to within 200 yards of a group of farm buildings atop Voxhill before coming under fire from two .30 calibre machine-guns that killed two men and forced the rest to seek cover. At first it was assumed the firing was accidental but when a faster-firing German weapon joined in, it became apparent that the 2nd Platoon had been overrun and Voxhill was held by the enemy. Casualties might have been more severe had the two squads not been well dispersed and without the shelter offered by the furrows, which fortuitously ran at right-angles to the German position. Lieutenant Sickler extracted his men from the trap by ordering his two .30 gun teams to crawl back along the furrows to the road bordering the field, from where they were able to provide covering fire for the remainder of the party to follow the same route, losing two more men in the process. The move fortuitously reoriented the paratroopers to face a flanking attack by two platoons of German troops from the north who employed fire-and-movement tactics to press on after Sickler’s men brought them under effective fire. The attack was finally halted 250 yards short of the US positions, but countering this new threat left the American’s right flank open to the Germans holding Voxhill, who poured withering 20mm cannon fire into the hapless paratroopers. This swelled the number of casualties including Lieutenant MacVicar; the Company Commander had crawled forward to inform Sickler that the messenger had found no sign of the 1st Platoon. Sickler was thus left the sole unwounded officer in a Company effectively reduced to less than Platoon strength, pinned down from two sides in an increasingly untenable position and running short of ammunition.64
The situation was retrieved to an extent by Captain Johnson from the Regimental Supply Section. On observing Sickler’s plight from the Company observation post on the ridge, he promptly contacted Colonel Lindquist via the Company SCR 300 and informed him that ‘Company D was surrounded on the drop zone, that the enemy was threatening to overrun the regimental supply dump and that the situation was extremely critical’. Captain Johnson then gathered together his Supply Section men and the Company HQ group and reoccupied the 2nd Platoon’s overnight position adjacent to the supply dump, approximately 400 yards west of Sickler’s patrol. From there he was able to use the stored ammunition to lay down fire sufficiently heavy to deter the German advance and ease the pressure on Sickler’s pinned-down platoon. Good use was made of an abandoned 60mm mortar, despite the lack of a baseplate or bipod, and the paratroopers were also assisted by eight Luftwaffe fighters which misidentified and strafed the attacking German troops.65 Captain Johnson’s radio call, which appears to have reached the forward Regimental HQ overlooking De Ploeg shortly before 10:00, galvanised Colonel Lindquist into rather more prompt action than he had displayed in getting his men to the Nijmegen road bridge the previous evening. The Regimental reserve, Captain Frank Schofield’s Company C, was ordered to march the four miles back to the landing area immediately to secure the start line for a battalion attack. Lieutenant-Colonel Warren was then ordered to break contact in Nijmegen, take the remainder of the 1st Battalion to Company C’s location and then counter-attack and clear the landing area of German troops before the arrival of the glider lift at 13:00. This was a rather tall order, given that the landing area lay seven to eight miles away and that Company B, which was still emplaced near the Keizer Karel Plein, was out of radio contact. Warren nonetheless ordered the bulk of Company A, which had been withdrawn earlier in the morning, to prepare to move and despatched his Operations Officer, Captain James Dietrich, to brief Company B and lead them back to Lindquist for further orders. Dietrich arrived at Captain Millsaps’ command post in the cellar of Nijmegen’s town hall at 11:00 and Company B was retracing i
ts route back to the Groesbeek Heights shortly thereafter. To their chagrin the withdrawing paratroopers were again greeted enthusiastically by the unwitting Dutch civilians they had encountered on the way into the city. As Millsaps later recalled:
One of the saddest, most touching experiences for me up to that time was that pull back from Nijmegen. The natives of the town, undoubtedly thinking the town was being liberated from German rule, came out in the streets shouting and dancing, kissing soldiers, and giving us fruit and handfuls of flowers. We dared not tell them, even if we could have spoken their language, that we were giving the city back to the Germans and moving back to start all over again.66
The German attack had a similar impact on the 505th Regiment’s frontage along the southern aspects of LZ N, sparking a number of sharp fights as the infiltrators ran up against the scattered US outposts. One notable action involved Staff-Sergeant Clarence Prager, who commanded a small outpost established in the edge of the Reichswald forest with Corporal Harry J. Buffone and a number of men, including a Browning Automatic Rifle team. They were swiftly surrounded by a large number of German troops who called on them to surrender and a fierce firefight developed after the paratroopers declined the offer. When the pressure became too much, Prager ordered Corporal Buffone to lead the Browning Automatic Rifle team back to the next outpost while he covered them with his Thompson gun, but Prager was hit in the head and killed; he was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his gallantry, and Corporal Buffone received the Silver Star for his part in the action.67 Lieutenant Harold L. Gensemer and 2nd Lieutenant Richard H. Brownlee’s platoon from Company C had been temporarily transferred to Company B, and unwittingly moved into the advancing Germans while establishing a roadblock near Riethorst; Brownlee had been slightly wounded in a skirmish with a German patrol in the same area in the early hours of 18 September. The outpost had barely finished setting in when it was approached by a Möbelwagen flak vehicle from Lieutenant Brownlee’s description.68 The vehicle killed two Browning Automatic Rifle gunners with its 37mm gun when they fired on it and proved impervious to Bazooka rockets, obliging the surviving paratroopers to withdraw to nearby high ground overlooking the outpost site. There they were pounded by German mortar and artillery fire, at least one strafing Messerschmitt 109 fighter and the Möbelwagen. The German fire caused numerous casualties and totally demolished a windmill atop the hill occupied by a US Forward Observer, who was unable to hit back effectively because the US guns were restricted to a mere five rounds per fire mission. Additional attempts to knock out the flak vehicle with Bazookas and Gammon bombs proved fruitless. Eventually, Gensemer and his men were given permission to withdraw to the main Company B line.69