Arnhem

by William F Buckingham

  In the meantime Hackett was having a fight of sorts back at Wolfheze. At approximately 23:00 Major James Linton from the 2nd Airlanding Light Battery arrived at Hackett’s HQ at the Hotel Buunderkamp bearing further orders from Division HQ. These again diverted the Brigade from its pre-existing mission, this time to secure a different area of high ground in the woods to the east of LZ L. Hackett responded by climbing into his Jeep and driving the four miles or so to the Hotel Hartenstein. Ostensibly this was because Major Linton was unable to answer queries about timings and co-ordination, but Hackett was doubtless also looking to confront Hicks in order to make clear his dissatisfaction with what he famously described as ‘an untidy situation’. However, while the two Brigadiers may have exchanged harsh words, Hackett does not appear to have openly challenged Hicks’ right to command and neither did he avoid having his mission amended to securing a mile-long ridge of high ground linking the Arnhem‒Ede railway and the Amsterdamseweg. Dubbed the Koepel (Dome) after a building located on it, the ridge lay around 1,000 yards east of the Oosterbeek Hoog railway crossing and its seizure was intended to be the first stage in opening a route into Arnhem from the north in order to bypass the German line blocking the Utrechtsestraatweg and Onderlangs. Hackett did however secure Hicks’ agreement to the transfer of the 7th KOSB to the 4th Parachute Brigade as a replacement for the 11th Parachute Battalion, presumably on the grounds that the Airlanding unit’s mission of protecting LZ L placed it in close proximity to the parachute brigade’s forming-up point for the advance to the Koepel ridge. For his part, Hicks was doubtless unhappy at seeing his already reduced formation being further dismembered, and insisted that Hackett permit the 7th KOSB to complete its existing mission before redeploying it. With that Hackett returned to his own HQ to draw up plans and orders for his Brigade’s shift in focus, arriving there at 01:30 on Tuesday 19 September.54

  While all this was going on around the landing area, the bulk of the 1st Parachute Brigade was continuing its attempt to fight through Sturmbannführer Spindler’s Sperrlinie in the western outskirts of Arnhem. The most forward element was Major Peter Waddy’s B Company, 3rd Parachute Battalion, which, accompanied by Lieutenant-Colonel Fitch’s Tactical HQ, Brigadier Lathbury, Major-General Urquhart, the detachments from the 1st Parachute Squadron RE and C Troop 1st Airlanding Anti-tank Battery, was occupying several houses on the right of the Utrechtsestraatweg backing onto the Lower Rhine, just west of the St. Elizabeth hospital. The remainder of the 3rd Battalion column had become separated near the Oosterbeek Laag underpass, almost a mile back down the Klingelbeekseweg; they were taken under command by Lieutenant-Colonel Dobie’s 1st Parachute Battalion when it approached the underpass at around 07:00. Major Waddy’s men had been observed entering the riverside houses by elements of Kampfgruppe Spindler and a stalemate ensued, with the Germans standing off and bringing down heavy fire on any attempt to move from the front of the houses from armoured vehicles stationed outside Gammon bomb range on the Utrechtsestraatweg, and from the rear by 20mm and possibly 37mm automatic weapons emplaced in a brick factory compound on the opposite bank of the Lower Rhine. Sergeant Gus Garnsworthy engaged one of these with his 6-Pounder gun with unknown results, although his gun was subsequently put out of action by German mortar fire that began at around 13:00; Sergeant Garnsworthy, his crew and C Troop’s commander Lieutenant Edward Shaw were then obliged to take shelter in the nearest house.55

  Ammunition supply became an increasing concern as the stalemate wore on and Colonel Fitch used a brief radio contact with the 1st Parachute Battalion, likely in the late morning to midday, to relay instructions for his A Company to join him with additional ammunition ‘at any costs’; the Battalion War Diary suggests that preparation for such an effort were already underway when the order was received.56 The order bore fruit at around 15:00 when Lieutenant Herbert Burwash and a party of up to forty drawn from his Assault Platoon and A Company arrived at Major Waddy’s location after fighting their way up the Klingelbeekseweg, accompanied by a Bren Carrier loaded with ammunition driven by Lieutenant Leo Heaps, a CanLoan officer attached to the 1st Battalion. According to his own account, Heaps was ordered to the Arnhem road bridge with a Jeep-load of ammunition on the orders of Major Hugh Maguire, the Divisional GSO2 (Intelligence) and was sequestered by Colonel Dobie en route.57 The ammunition was distributed around the Battalion’s location on Colonel Fitch’s order, but Major Waddy and his Company Sergeant Major Reginald Allen were killed by mortar fire while assisting in the unloading. The incident was witnessed by the Battalion second-in-command, Major Alan Bush: ‘Peter Waddy had no need to go out, but he was very impetuous…I saw him killed. There was just a blinding flash and…there he was, prostrate. There was not a mark on him – killed outright by blast.’58 Groups of Germans then began to infiltrate into the B Company location from the west. Major Bush, ensconced in a house with Lathbury and Urquhart, spotted one group but refrained from opening fire to avoid endangering his superiors. Another group were fired on by a Bren further up the Utrechtsestraatweg as they passed the house occupied by Sergeant Garnsworthy and Lieutenant Shaw and the latter shot two that tried to enter with his Sten gun: ‘One fell into the house; one fell outside. The one inside was wounded – hit in the stomach. I made him as comfortable as I could in a chair, but I couldn’t do much because there was firing at the rear of the house, and it was obvious that we had to get out.’59

  At this point B Company was still a going concern, having lost only a handful of casualties during the stand-off and having been resupplied with ammunition courtesy of Lieutenant Heaps. However, the appearance of the German infiltrators raised the prospect of being cut off from the remainder of the 3rd Battalion and Lieutenant-Colonel Fitch decided to make another attempt to break through to the Arnhem road bridge, abandoning the Utrechtsestraatweg route in favour of moving through the houses west of the St Elizabeth Hospital to the railway marshalling yard and then following the tracks east. The break-out was to be led by Lieutenant Burwash’s party, followed by Fitch’s Tactical HQ and B Company, with the 1st Parachute Squadron contingent bringing up the rear. Despite the volume of German fire the paratroopers successfully crossed the bullet-swept Utrechtsestraatweg but the gridwork of streets on the other side were also occupied by elements of Kampfgruppe Spindler, specifically from Obersturmführer Heinz Gropp’s SS Panzer FlaK Abteilung 9. Lieutenant Burwash thus ran into fire from numerous machine-guns and mortars and the entire 3rd Battalion was again pinned down with Fitch, Burwash and around seventy men occupying houses on one side of a street with the remainder, also numbering around seventy, holding the other. Both groups fought on independently, with the Germans again preferring to stand off and fire on any movement. The commander of the second group, the 3rd Battalion’s Intelligence Officer Lieutenant Alexis Vedeniapine, distinguished himself by moving repeatedly between the houses occupied by his men over a two-hour period with ‘complete disregard for his own safety’. The firing died down toward nightfall, although German armoured vehicles then approached the British positions but restricted their contribution to firing large amounts of tracer ammunition down the open streets with their machine-guns before withdrawing; this was likely intended to clarify the contested area for the benefit of the German infantry occupying the surrounding buildings. As the German quiescence might have been preparation for a night attack the paratroopers held in place in the darkness, while Colonel Fitch drew up another scheme for finding a way through to the Arnhem road bridge, which involved moving back to the Rhine Pavilion for another attempt along the riverside Onderlangs road.60

  While all this was going on Major-General Urquhart was busy compounding his existing errors of judgement. Having decided to remain with the 3rd Parachute Battalion when it resumed its advance to Arnhem rather than travelling the two miles or so back to his HQ at the landing area, Urquhart had spent 18 September moving three miles in the opposite direction before becoming pinned down on the Utrechtsestraatweg with B Company. That wilfully se
parating himself from the Divisional levers of command might not have been the wisest course appears to have occurred to him then; in contrast to his earlier justification of placing himself where he could control events to some extent, Urquhart admitted in his account that ‘As a divisional commander mixed up in a battalion encounter, and personally situated somewhere in the middle of the column at that, I was in the worst possible position to intervene too much.’61 Urquhart therefore decided to make his way back to his HQ in the late afternoon while Lathbury, under the erroneous impression that the bulk of his Brigade was fighting nearer the centre of Arnhem, decided to move forward. The decision appears to have been made in the run-up to Colonel Fitch’s attempted move north across the Utrechtsestraatweg, given that the 3rd Parachute Battalion War Diary refers to Urquhart and Lathbury’s decision to leave and pursue their own routes.62 For his part, Fitch was doubtless happy at the prospect of being left to fight his Battalion without his Brigade and Division commanders looking over his shoulder.

  The two senior commanders, accompanied by Lathbury’s Intelligence Officer, Captain William Taylor, appear to have moved across the Utrechtsestraatweg with the rest of the B Company group at approximately 16:00 before striking off on their own. However, they soon became disoriented in the maze of walled backyards and ended up in a house occupied by Lieutenant James Cleminson and 5 Platoon, who warned his illustrious visitors that his was the 3rd Battalion point platoon and that everything in their direction of travel was German-held. Cleminson then set about organising a section to act as escort but Urquhart had other ideas and launched himself out into the open roadway shouting ‘Come on Gerald [Lathbury], we must go and have a look.’ He was trailed by Lathbury, Taylor and an appalled Cleminson reportedly calling in turn ‘For goodness sake don’t, you will only run into a lot of Germans.’ Cleminson assumed that at least some of his men would follow but they too had other ideas; as Cleminson subsequently commented, ‘My men thought we were mad, and rather sensibly did not follow.’63 Running across open streets swept by enemy fire was a risky business and before long Lathbury was hit in the leg and back, with one round chipping his spine. His companions managed to manhandle him into the relative safety of No. 135 Alexanderstraat to render first aid, where Lathbury repeatedly insisted his companions leave him and make good their escape; they were obliged to do just that after Urquhart shot a passing German with his pistol. Leaving Lathbury in the care of the Dutch householders the three surviving officers made off again, this time eschewing the open streets in favour of the maze of walled backyards and ended up with the householder of No.14 Zwarteweg, Mr Anton Derksen, who warned that more German troops were approaching and ushered them to the relative safety of his attic. After carrying out a cursory search of the house that fortunately did not include the attic, the Germans set up a section position in front of No. 14 that included an anti-tank gun or an armoured vehicle depending on the account, which was parked directly outside the front door.64 Urquhart and his companions were therefore trapped in their attic, as Lieutenant Cleminson discovered when he stealthily ventured downstairs at around nightfall.

  Urquhart’s move to regain his Division HQ was therefore another poorly thought-out and executed decision in the chain that began with his impetuous and needless departure from his HQ the previous day, and he continued in the same vein while debating possible courses of action with Cleminson and Taylor. According to Cleminson, Urquhart ‘held a very democratic discussion between the three of us as to what we should do next’, during which Cleminson suggested ‘that the only sensible thing for us to do was to sit tight in the attic until first light…if we went downstairs and were lucky enough to avoid the [German] section, which was at the front of the house, we were unlikely to get back into our own lines without being shot by one side or the other. The IO [Taylor] agreed with me.’65 However, this was perhaps understating Urquhart’s stance in the exchange, given that his own account refers to suggesting an attack on the armoured vehicle with hand-grenades and using the resultant confusion as cover for their escape, and that he was ‘outvoted’ by his companions’ obvious and indeed understandable lack of enthusiasm for the idea.66 While he may not have mentioned it at the time, Cleminson later admitted to being less than impressed with his Division Commander’s behaviour: ‘I have never understood how the General and the Brigadier could be quite so foolhardy as to advance through their own front-line, and subsequently all General Roy would say was that he had lost touch by wireless…and wanted to see for himself. Well he certainly did!’67

  At this point Urquhart had been absent from and out of touch with his HQ for over twenty-four hours, leaving the 1st Airborne Division effectively leaderless. This state of affairs is usually excused on the grounds that Urquhart’s initial decision to leave his HQ in the manner he did was ill-judged but understandable, given his desire to see what was happening, and that he simply became an unwitting victim of events thereafter. As we have seen, however, this explanation simply does not hold water, not least because Urquhart’s poor decision-making predated arrival in Holland, and leaving his HQ on a baseless rumour once there, did nothing to help him see anything. On the contrary, it simply removed him from what communication links and command systems there were, and the series of events he subsequently became a victim of were all self-generated by faulty reasoning and decision-making. All this makes it difficult to escape two interlinked conclusions. First, it is no exaggeration to say that Urquhart did not make a single correct decision between arriving at his Horsa at RAF Fairford in the early morning of Sunday 17 September and becoming incarcerated in the attic of No.14 Zwarteweg. Second, he was simply out of his depth in the first phase of Operation MARKET, having failed to grasp the essential differences between Airborne and conventional ground operations. To be fair this was not totally Urquhart’s fault, given that he had harboured doubts about his suitability and that circumstances and illness had conspired against him grasping those essential differences in the period between assuming command of the 1st Airborne Division in January 1944 and embarking for Holland. Ultimate responsibility lay with those who elevated him to that command, and the episode is a damning example of the deleterious consequences that could arise from the promotion-via-patronage system endemic in the British Army of that time and arguably since.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Dobie’s 1st Parachute Battalion spent 18 September fighting its own battle in virtual isolation, despite being located only around a mile from Urquhart and Fitch. After taking the cut-off portion of the 3rd Battalion column under command near the Oosterbeek Laag underpass at 07:00, the 1st Battalion’s advance came to a halt a few hundred yards east of the underpass at around 09:00 in the face of fire from weapons emplaced on Den Brink on the left and houses and a factory ahead on Klingelbeekseweg; German fire from the latter direction was reportedly thickened by four armoured cars and a tank of some kind, which were likely Kampfgruppe Möller’s Sd.Kfz 251 half-tracks. The 1st Battalion’s lead element, Major Christopher Perrin-Brown’s T Company, was therefore obliged to take shelter in houses on either side of the road, and fire from the factory and the light-calibre flak weapons emplaced across the river also stymied attempts to move through backyards and gardens. The advance then stalled for several hours while the paratroopers reorganised, and the fact that the 1st Battalion had been moving and fighting virtually non-stop for eighteen hours likely also had some bearing on the hiatus. The factory area, located on the right between the Klingelbeekseweg and the Lower Rhine and consisting of a number of brick buildings and chimneys set amongst scrub-covered spoil heaps, was identified as the major obstacle to further advance, but an attack in the early afternoon was rebuffed, largely by 20mm fire from the brickworks across the river.68

  Lieutenant-Colonel Dobie then set about organising a co-ordinated effort following discussion with the ranking 3rd Battalion officer, Major Mervyn Dennison of A Company; Dennison appears to have been in the process of organising his own attack when Fitch relayed his radio demand for i
mmediate reinforcement and resupply. As Dobie had commandeered the 3rd Battalion’s support platoons the plan was for the remainder of the 3rd Battalion column, consisting of Dennison’s A Company and Lieutenant Burwash’s Assault Platoon, to attack along the high ground on the left of the Klingelbeekseweg with Major Perrin-Brown’s T Company on their right; Lieutenant Eric Davies’ twelve-strong 10 Platoon was tasked to attack up the road, briefed by Dobie in person, while Lieutenant Hellingoe’s 11 Platoon was instructed to simply ‘clear the factory’ by Major Perrin-Brown.69 The attack was again supported by mortars, Vickers guns, artillery fire from the Light Regiment’s 3 Battery and at least one of the attached 6-Pounder anti-tank guns; the latter scored a direct hit on a German bunker in the factory area causing a number of casualties and may also have been responsible for knocking out a German armoured car.70 The attack began at around 14:00 and as we have seen, the 3rd Battalion contingent succeeded in fighting its way through to B Company’s location. In the process Major Dennison was knocked unconscious by the blast from a mortar bomb and then seriously wounded in both arms in a hand-to-hand encounter that obliged him to hand over command to Lieutenant Burwash; Dennison was later awarded the Military Cross for this and his actions against Bataillon Krafft west of Oosterbeek the previous day.71 The T Company contingent went forward in a rapid advance despite the enemy fire. Lieutenant Hellingoe’s 11 Platoon, numbering around forty after Major Perrin-Brown rounded up some reinforcements, charged straight through the scrub-covered spoil heaps toward the factory buildings, some shouting the 1st Parachute Brigade’s North African war cry ‘Waho Mohammed’. Hellingoe pressed on despite being wounded in the right foot but was brought low by another hit in the left ankle; according to his citation for a Dutch award he refused to be evacuated until the sharpshooter had been located and dealt with.72 He was dragged to safety by his Platoon Sergeant John Richards, who exposed himself to heavy enemy fire for twenty minutes to do so. Richards then suppressed an enemy position in one of the factory buildings with a hand-grenade, reorganised the Platoon under cover of smoke and then continued the advance.73 Two or three others including Hellingoe’s batman, Private Geoff Baker, were also hit, possibly after the factory had been cleared: ‘Returning, we noticed a German half-track marked with a Red Cross between us and the river but we did not take a lot of notice. We should have done as it opened up with a machine gun and I was one of two or three wounded...with a shattered shin.’74 Private Baker was helped to safety by a member of 10 Platoon but subsequently lost his leg.