Arnhem

by William F Buckingham

  Lieutenant Davies and his depleted 10 Platoon made it up the incline without suffering any casualties, although a Bren gunner was killed by a hit in the face shortly afterward in an exchange with Germans holding nearby houses. Most of the houses were also occupied by Dutch civilians, some of whom provided the reorganising paratroopers with food and drink until increasingly heavy German fire drove them to shelter; Davies set his Platoon medic to treating a young girl shot through the thigh while his men held back her ‘berserk’ mother. Despite being down to only eight or nine men by this point, Davies nonetheless pushed on up the Klingelbeekseweg but ran out of luck while directing another Bren gunner onto a German machine-gun position: ‘Old soldiers say that you never see the one that hits you. I did – it was a tracer…coming over in a flat arc from our right flank. The bullet went through the top of both my legs, severing the sciatic nerve in my right leg on the way. A second bullet then went through my small pack and wounded me in the neck.’75

  While this was going on Major Ronald Stark’s S Company was hit with what was described as a ‘light attack’ from the rear near the Oosterbeek Laag underpass; the attackers were presumably infiltrators from the SS atop Den Brink and were beaten off with the loss of six British casualties. The attack east up the Klingelbeekseweg had cleared the factory and carried the advance halfway up the slope toward the junction with the Utrechtseweg, but T Company was reduced to just twenty-two men in the process. Major Perrin-Brown therefore amalgamated the remnants of 10 and 11 Platoons and with all his platoon commanders dead or wounded, divided the resulting grouping in two and placed an experienced platoon sergeant with each; he then took command of one group and placed his Company second-in-command, Captain James Richie, in charge of the other. The attack up the Klingelbeekseweg was then resumed and reached the junction with the Utrechtseweg at 15:00, which was secured with the help of the 3rd Battalion mortars in the face of intense fire from German machine-guns, mortars and what was identified as an 88mm gun.76 Perrin-Brown’s little band and the remainder of Dobie’s Battalion then pushed along the south side of the Utrechtseweg for over an hour, moving past the Rhine Pavilion and through the houses recently vacated by the 3rd Parachute Battalion in the face of numerous snipers and machine-guns. Private Douglas Charlton recalled that ‘there were bodies of our 3rd Battalion lying everywhere. Officers and NCOs were running in and out of houses trying to chivvy men along; some had stayed behind to comfort dead or dying comrades.’77

  The advance was halted at the approaches to the next road junction, a fork in front of the St Elizabeth Hospital 400 yards east of the end of the Klingelbeekseweg; the left prong carried the Utrechtsestraatweg uphill toward the Municipal Museum while the right prong carried the Onderlangs down to and along the riverside. Enemy tanks were reported ahead on the Utrechtseweg and the light flak guns emplaced in the brickworks on the south bank of the Lower Rhine again made their presence felt. But on this occasion support was available and Lieutenant Antony Driver called down suppressive fire from 3 Battery’s 75mm Pack Howitzers along with Dobie’s co-opted mortars and Vickers guns, which knocked out two flak guns on the riverbank; the Vickers’ gunners were credited with ‘good work’ after hitting a number of running Germans. In an effort to maintain momentum Dobie switched his advance to the north side of the Utrechtsestraatweg at 17:00, crossing the road under cover of smoke and moving through the backyards to avoid the worst of the German fire; this too attracted heavy machine-gun and mortar fire that eventually brought movement to a halt by the St Elizabeth Hospital, and left the paratroopers cut off from the Battalion vehicles. An attempt to bring them up was abandoned with the loss of a Bren Carrier.78 The portion of T Company with Sergeant Richards appears to have been reduced to just three men in the process of clearing a German position and Richards was subsequently awarded the Military Medal for this and his earlier actions at the factory on the Klingelbeekseweg. As another member of T Company, Lance-Sergeant John Fryer, put it: ‘We couldn’t get past them because it was like daylight with all the tracer fire…The fire was coming from the hospital and from across the Rhine where there was a brickfield and factory. Every move we made the Germans had us under fire.’79 However, the 20mm fire from across the Rhine did not deter Fryer from dropping his equipment and running out into the open to the aid of a wounded Sergeant named Collis; interestingly, the German fire ceased while Fryer hauled the bulky Collis onto his shoulder and carried him to safety, although it is unclear whether the pause was deliberate or due to a fortuitous magazine change.80

  By 18:30 the 1st Parachute Battalion had effectively fought itself to a standstill and in the process had been reduced to around a hundred men with little remaining ammunition. At that point contact was again made with the force holding the Arnhem road bridge, presumably via Bombardier Leo Hall’s jury-rigged No. 22 and No. 68 sets, and Dobie was again ordered to get through to the road bridge at all costs. The order came from Frost, who had assumed command of the 1st Parachute Brigade on learning that Lathbury was missing, and he instructed the 1st and 3rd Battalions to form a force of at least company strength and push through to the bridge by midnight. Isolated at the road bridge with problems of his own, Frost had no way of knowing that by this time neither battalion had the strength or wherewithal to do any such thing, but Dobie nonetheless set about organising a move back across the Utrechtseweg to ‘try right down on [the] river bank’, using darkness as cover against the guns emplaced in the brickworks on the south bank. This appears to have worked to some extent, but movement was again hampered by closer German guns sweeping all the roads and side streets with automatic fire.81

  Help, however, was at hand in the shape of Lieutenant-Colonel McCardie and the first-lift portion of the 2nd South Staffords. On leaving its overnight position at LZ S at around 10:00 the South Staffords had made for the Utrechtseweg and was in Oosterbeek within two hours despite an ineffectual strafing near the Hotel Wolfheze. There it came upon a party of between forty and sixty stragglers from the 1st Parachute Battalion gathered in by the commander of R Company, Major John Timothy; McCardie took Timothy’s band under command and reinforced him with Major Toler and his B Squadron Glider Pilots before pushing on.82 D Company emerged from the eastern outskirts of Oosterbeek at 13:00 and promptly ran into fire from elements of Kampfgruppe Möller positioned in buildings along the Utrechtseweg backed by automatic weapons on the Mariendaal feature and the embanked railway spur. Major Phillp’s men immediately set about clearing the route but McCardie was wary of being drawn into a costly and drawn-out fight and began seeking an alternative way through the streets onto the riverside LION route. The advance was resumed at 17:30, covered by D Company, and within two hours McCardie’s Tactical HQ and depleted B and Support Company had passed through the Oosterbeek Laag underpass and up the Klingelbeekseweg into Arnhem, making contact with Dobie near the junction with the Utrechtsestraatweg at 20:00. Although he appears to have deferred to Dobie’s greater knowledge of the local situation, McCardie felt it unwise to resume the advance with only his understrength B Company and between seventy and a hundred exhausted paratroopers, preferring to wait until the rest of his Battalion caught up. The two officers therefore drew up a compromise plan to resume the advance at 01:00, in order to allow time for Dobie’s exhausted men to reorganise and rest, and for the remainder of the 2nd South Staffords to catch up.83 Dobie’s men appear to have been left to rest although not all benefited, as Private Charlton recalled:

  Someone made tea, and we ate from our ration packs; we also ate bottled pears from the cellar of the house we had occupied. Then I was detailed to go with a sergeant and four men back along our route to look for stragglers. I had been on the move without sleep for more than forty hours and was none too pleased. It was dark now, and we found medics patching up the wounded along the way as well as many reluctant heroes hiding in the houses; these were directed to our new position or they joined us.84

  The next increment of the 2nd South Staffords arrived at around mid
night. Major Phillp and D Company began to break contact at 18:30 in order to follow in McCardie’s wake. This took some time and in the process they were fortuitously joined by Major Thomas Lane and A Company, the lead element of the Battalion’s second lift. Lane assumed overall command as senior in rank but was unwilling to proceed through the Oosterbeek Laag underpass without any idea of what was on the far side. He therefore went forward in person to clarify the situation and having found and conferred with McCardie near the Rhine Pavilion, returned to lead the party forward, deploying D Company on the north side of the Utrechtseweg opposite B Company on the south, while A Company deployed along the line of the road behind them.85 The passage of the remainder of the South Staffords’ second lift, consisting of the Battalion Main HQ under Major John Commings, Major Philip Wright’s C Company, MMG and anti-tank elements, the Battalion’s twenty-five Jeeps and trailers and Major Robert Cain with B Company’s HQ element, was not so straightforward. After leaving the landing area at around 17:30, a pause at the Hotel Hartenstein resulted in Division HQ appropriating a number of the Mortar Platoon’s Jeeps and the anti-tank element being detached to assist the 1st Border. In exchange a section from the 9th (Airborne) Field Company RE was attached to Major Cain’s party for the trip to the Arnhem road bridge while Lieutenant Donald Edwards and 17 Platoon also appear to have been sequestered. The South Staffords column then became separated in the congestion on the Utrechtseweg, apparently due to the 11th Parachute Battalion insinuating itself into the column behind A Company, and unwittingly ran into Kampfgruppe Möller’s guns firing on fixed lines down the roadway in the darkness. Major Commings was thus obliged to emulate Colonel McCardie by withdrawing and seeking an alternative route, with the added complication of turning two dozen Jeeps and trailers in pitch darkness, an operation which took several hours and carried on into the early hours of Tuesday 19 September.86

  It is difficult not to sympathise with Dobie and McCardie and especially the former, who had been operating totally without guidance or support for the entire thirty-five hours since leaving DZ X at 15:30 on 17 September. Both Battalion commanders were functioning in a vacuum with no effective contact, guidance or support from higher up the chain of command and no clear information about the situation, friendly or enemy. The man who should have been supporting and controlling their efforts was temporarily paralysed as a result of wounds to the legs and lower back only a few hundred yards away at No. 135 Alexanderstraat. The man responsible for putting him there and indeed with overall responsibility for Dobie, McCardie and everyone else from the 1st Airborne Division on the ground in Holland was also impotently sequestered in the attic of No.14 Zwarteweg within a stone’s throw of the action, as a result of his own impetuosity and poor judgement. While the reins of command had been passed to Hicks at 09:15 on the morning of Monday 18 September, this did not herald any major shift away from the existing Division plan despite the vastly changed circumstances, although to be fair the scope for revision was limited during Hicks’ tenure, as the 1st Airlanding Brigade was fully committed to protecting the landing area for the inbound second lift, and then covering the eastward move of the numerous Divisional units and securing LZ L for the third lift.

  There was scope for revision with regard to the 4th Parachute Brigade however, specifically by cancelling its existing and now superfluous mission in favour of employing it in its entirety to reinforce the drive for the Division’s primary objective, Hackett’s objections notwithstanding. This was even more the case because by 15:00 Division HQ was aware that the 1st Parachute Brigade’s drive to the Arnhem road bridge had gone seriously awry and that only a fraction of a single battalion had reached that primary objective.87 A full Brigade attack with artillery support from the Airlanding Light Regiment along the axis of the Utrechtseweg ought to have been feasible by midnight if not earlier, given the actual timings and movements of the Brigade’s constituent units after landing; the 11th Parachute Battalion was in the eastern outskirts of Oosterbeek by around 20:00 for example, and 156 Parachute Battalion had covered a similar amount of ground by 21:00.88 Such an attack would have had good prospects for success as the c. 100-strong element of Kampfgruppe Möller occupying the embanked railway spur was holding not only the embankment but also the Mariendaal (a historic country estate) and Den Brink features and the line of the Klingelbeekseweg facing the Lower Rhine. Darkness reduced the effectiveness of the German automatic weapons located on the high ground, as is clear from the relative ease with which British units passed through the Oosterbeek Laag underpass after nightfall, and a breakthrough along the Utrechtsestraatweg would have outflanked and/or exposed the rear of the units manning the southern section of Spindler’s Sperrlinie. Indeed, it might well have unhinged the entire blocking line and created a corridor down to the Arnhem road bridge through which the remainder of the Division could have passed. This situation would not apply indefinitely however, for German reinforcements and tactical redeployments were slowly but surely tipping the balance against the British and would eventually render the blocking line impregnable; as Hauptsturmführer Wilfried Schwarz, 9 SS Panzer Division’s chief-of-staff, put it: ‘As reinforcements arrived, it dawned on us that we might succeed…Dozens of commanders reported to me at divisional headquarters, and these I parcelled out to the front.’89 The British situation was therefore analogous to that pertaining twenty-four hours earlier, when more energetic leadership could have seen the bulk if not all of the 1st Parachute Brigade safely into Arnhem before Spindler could erect his blocking line.

  Unfortunately for the Arnhem portion of MARKET such leadership was again not forthcoming, because Hicks was satisfied to follow the existing plan with the minor adjustments of despatching reinforcements piecemeal to the 1st Parachute Brigade and slightly refocusing the 4th Parachute Brigade’s mission to secure the Koepel ridge, and even then only in direct response to events. This strongly suggests Hicks saw his role as a temporary and essentially passive caretaker under Mackenzie’s close supervision until Urquhart returned to resume command, and the appropriateness of this approach was doubtless reinforced by an erroneous late evening report that Urquhart was with the 2nd Parachute Battalion near the Arnhem road bridge.90 Aside from the fact that the situation demanded a rather more pro-active and vigorous attitude, the problem was that Hick’s stewardship was a combination of business as usual with a tendency toward learned behaviour response. For example, following receipt of another erroneous report in the late evening of 18 September that the force at the Arnhem road bridge had been overrun, at 01:00 in the morning of 19 September, Hicks ordered Dobie to abandon the effort to reach the bridge and withdraw to Oosterbeek, only to reverse his decision ninety minutes later.91

  There does not appear to have been much effort to clarify the situation or confirm the accuracy of incoming reports. At 23:30 for example, an unnamed officer from the 2nd South Staffords reportedly arrived at Division HQ with the accurate news that the 1st and 3rd Parachute Battalions had been reduced to a combined strength of 150 men commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Dobie, that the Staffords’ two lead companies were under fire near the Rhine Pavilion from the south bank of the Lower Rhine, along with the inaccurate information that Urquhart and Lathbury were with the 2nd Parachute Battalion at a grid reference on the south side of the Arnhem road bridge, and that the South Staffords were ‘out of touch’ with Dobie’s force.92 The identity of the messenger and source of his information is unclear, although he may have been despatched by Dobie following interception of a radio transmission from an artillery forward observer at the bridge monitored at some point after 23:00, presumably to ensure Division HQ was aware that Frost’s force was still holding out.93 The errors may also have been the result of poor transcription, given that several orders and reports from Division HQ recorded in other unit War Diaries do not appear in the Division HQ Diary. The essential point here is that no effort appears to have been made to seek verification for this report, even though darkness significantly reduced th
e danger in passing back and forth through the Oosterbeek Laag underpass, and there were no entries in the Division HQ War Diary at all between 23:30 on 18 September and 07:25 the following morning. So Hicks appears to have been happy to remain ensconced at Division HQ diligently overseeing the execution of an increasingly outmoded and irrelevant plan while the 1st Airborne Division’s final chance to complete its primary mission of securing a passage across the Lower Rhine ebbed slowly away.

  By midnight on Monday 18 September, thirty-four hours after landing, the surviving bulk of the 1st Parachute Brigade was still stalled just over a mile short of its primary objective, with the remainder of the 1st Airborne Division backing up behind it. There were also some scattered elements caught in the German-occupied space between Dobie’s men and the road bridge perimeter. Lieutenant John Dickson, commanding the 3rd Parachute Battalion’s Mortar platoon, found himself alone after leading a charge that branched off along the lower Onderlangs road and carried him 750 yards beyond the St Elizabeth Hospital. Coming to a halt by the harbour area near the pontoon bridge site, Dickson gathered up two other stray members of the 3rd Battalion and took shelter in a nearby house where they were obliged to emulate Urquhart by taking refuge in the roof space when German troops occupied the lower floors.94 Another group led by Major Anthony Deane-Drummond, second-in-command of the Division Signals Section and a veteran of the Tragino raid in February 1941 (the first ever British parachute raid on enemy territory), were holed up nearby. Deane-Drummond had left the landing area with his batman at 07:30 on 18 September to inform the 1st Parachute Brigade HQ of a new HQ radio frequency; the change, which may have been a daily routine, was necessary to avoid interference from a more powerful British transmitter.95 In the process he came across a leaderless group from the 3rd Parachute Battalion, likely in the vicinity of the Klingelbeekseweg and led them forward before also being halted near the harbour. Unable to return to British lines, Deane-Drummond instructed his force, by now reduced to around twenty, to break up into small groups, lay low and rendezvous after dark for another attempt to reach the bridge; this may have been the source of Dickson’s two 3rd Battalion men. Deane-Drummond then led a group of three including his batman into a nearby house that was also subsequently occupied by a party of Germans intent on turning it into a strongpoint. The outnumbered paratroopers were therefore obliged to lock themselves in a lavatory at the rear of the house; fortunately the Germans made no attempt to investigate the locked door beyond a cursory rattle of the handle.96