By 06:00 B Company had pushed the Germans back another 300 yards or so to the Municipal Museum, where the Utrechtsestraat began to curve right back toward the river; for some reason the South Staffords referred to the museum as ‘the Monastery’. However, by this point losses were again impinging on combat effectiveness – and B Company had already lost its HQ element and a full rifle platoon during the fly-in on 17 September. Wary of committing his remaining available rifle company and unaware that his missing C Company and support elements were to hand just west of the St Elizabeth Hospital, Colonel McCardie therefore decided to establish a firm base and seek reinforcement from the 11th Parachute Battalion before resuming the attack. Some elements of B Company and Lieutenant Russell and his little band from the 2nd Parachute Battalion therefore moved into the museum along with Battalion HQ under Captain John Chapman and the Battalion Medical Officer, Captain Brian Brownscombe, who established his RAP in the cellar with the assistance of Chaplain Alan Buchanan. The remainder of B and D Companies occupied a large wooded hollow in the slope just west of the museum flanked by a narrow cobbled track running down to the Onderlangs, where they were joined by Captain Willcocks and Lieutenant Reynolds with their mortars looking to provide fire support for Dobie’s attack down on the riverside. Finally, McCardie ordered up Major Lane’s A Company; Company HQ and Lieutenant Clowes and 10 Platoon moved into the museum while Lieutenant William Withnall’s 7 Platoon and Lieutenant Alan Barker’s 8 Platoon occupied three houses opposite the museum after driving out the German defenders, accompanied by elements from the Mortar Group. Three half-tracks, one of them mounting a 20mm gun and likely from Obersturmführer Gropp’s SS Panzer FlaK Abteilung 9, withdrew east along the Utrechtsestraat before Withnall and Barker’s men; the flak vehicle may have been shot up and abandoned in the street by the east end of the museum. A Company HQ and at least one platoon also moved into the museum proper.48
Back at the junction of the Utrechtsestraat and Onderlangs Lieutenant-Colonel Fitch and the remnants of the 3rd Battalion had completed their withdrawal to the Rhine Pavilion, making contact with Major Stark’s company from the 1st Battalion and an unidentified Company from the 2nd South Staffords in the process. As we have seen, Major Bush, Captain Dorrien-Smith and a second party had also made contact with Dobie and the remainder of his Battalion before joining Fitch. With his force concentrated, Fitch abandoned his plan of establishing a strongpoint at the Pavilion in favour of assisting Dobie’s attack, and the 3rd Battalion moved off in the wake of Dobie’s Battalion at around first light with Lieutenant Burwash and A Company in the lead followed by Battalion HQ and a party from the 1st Parachute Squadron under Captain Cecil Cox, with Dorrien-Smith and B Company bringing up the rear.49
The area of the Rhine Pavilion remained busy after their departure, however. Lieutenant John Williams, the 1st Parachute Battalion’s Motor Transport Officer, had gathered a up around fifty men from his Battalion with the transport just west of the Pavilion, Lieutenant Albert Turrell, HQ Company’s second-in-command, had brought up the 1st Battalion’s second lift component to the same area during the night, and elements of the 11th Parachute Battalion were also in the area preparing to provide support for Dobie and McCardie’s attacks.50 At around 07:00 they were joined by a more illustrious visitor in the shape of Major-General Urquhart, accompanied by Captain Taylor and Lieutenant Cleminson. The German withdrawal during the night of 18-19 September had removed the German presence in front of No. 14 Zwarteweg and the three officers took their leave shortly after first light, moving stealthily through the deserted streets back toward the Pavilion, ‘where jeeps and parts of the 1st and 3rd Battalions were milling around’.51 After ascertaining the location of Division HQ, Urquhart swiftly commandeered a Jeep for the short drive to the Hotel Hartenstein while Cleminson sought out 5 Platoon. Arriving at 07:25, Urquhart was greeted by Operations Officer Lieutenant-Colonel Mackenzie with ‘We had assumed, Sir, that you had gone for good.’ Urquhart’s batman Private Hancock took the edge off the somewhat downbeat greeting by producing a mug of tea and hot shaving water while Urquhart waited for Brigadier Hicks to return from a visit to the 1st Airlanding Brigade.52
In the meantime the 1st Parachute Battalion had overrun outlying German positions on the open ground by the river with bayonets and grenades, taking a number of prisoners and reaching a road junction just short of the harbour. A combination of daylight and physical proximity finally permitted the attacking paratroopers to see the enemy positions plaguing them, although this was a double-edged sword, as Sergeant Frank Manser from S Company’s 7 Platoon discovered:
I reached nearly to the houses at the end of the open area. I was fired on there, but for the first time I could see where the fire was coming from. They were about ten yards away in a sandbagged position, possibly a section position with several different weapons…I fired back…but I ran out of ammunition, and that is when they hit me…I felt them shoot off the haversack on my back, then I was wounded in the left arm and under the heart – two separate shots.53
At 05:00 Major Timothy and R Company were ordered to deal with the fire coming from the high ground to the left, and Sergeant Dennis Barrett from 1 Platoon led a small group up the slope and into the German-occupied houses. There they drove back some half-tracks with Gammon bombs and overran two infantry guns, killing the crews and rolling the weapons down the slope to prevent them being re-manned before taking cover in the houses when the half-tracks moved forward and reopened fire. Something of a stand-off ensued, with the vehicles wary of coming too close and provoking another shower of Gammon bombs.54
Down at the riverside the remainder of the 1st Battalion were unable to make any headway in the face of the hellish crossfire from the German positions blocking the Onderlangs road to its front, the high ground to the left and the brickworks across the river; the firepower of the latter had been augmented by elements of SS Panzer Aufklärungs Abteilung 9 which had survived Gräbner’s ill-fated attempt to force the Arnhem road bridge the previous day. Lacking radio contact with his Company commanders and deducing from the lack of firing that the South Staffords’ effort on the left had been stymied, Dobie went forward to Major Timothy’s location at around 06:00 in search of a sheltered position in which to regroup; in the process he was wounded in the head, eye and arm by grenade fragments.55 By this point the 140 men who had crossed the start line with Dobie two hours earlier had been reduced to just thirty-nine; Major Timothy’s composite R Company was worst hit with just six survivors, Major Perrin-Brown’s T Company was down to eight, Dobie’s Battalion HQ to ten and Major Stark’s S Company to fifteen.56 As remaining out in the open could only result in total annihilation, Dobie ordered a move into the houses on the high ground to the left at 06:30. The order came too late for Major Stark’s party, which was pinned down in some abandoned German trenches closer to the river and appears to have been overwhelmed there. Gaining shelter in the houses involved running the gauntlet of Germans throwing grenades from the upper stories, fragments of which wounded Private Willoughby as he tried to reach Major Timothy as the latter gestured from a house further up the street; Willoughby was subsequently taken prisoner. Private Thomas Davies and a group from the 1st Battalion’s Mortar Platoon fought their way into the rear of one house and drove the occupying SS up to the first floor after a brief but bitter hand-to-hand fight. Major Perrin-Brown and just seven men made it into another house while Dobie and five men including Major Timothy entered another, which proved to be occupied by a large group of Dutch civilians.57
The shelter was illusory. German armoured vehicles soon moved up and began firing into the British-occupied buildings while SS infantry moved in to clear the interlopers house by house. Dobie’s party, four of whom were wounded, were taken prisoner when SS troops entered their house at around 07:30.58 Private Davies’ group held out despite the close-range fire until they were virtually out of ammunition and after burning maps and any other documents that might prove useful to their captors,
waited patiently to surrender in an increasingly unsettling silence. Finally, ‘a stark shadow fell across the doorway and a young German soldier, closely followed by two companions, appeared. They could not have been older than seventeen. Their guns jerking about in their hands expressed their nervous and excitable mood as they shouted “Hinder hoc” [sic], their eyes darting quickly about the dimly lit room. I am certain that one careless or thoughtless move on our part would have been suicidal. They would surely have blasted us to ribbons.’ Davies and his comrades passed the notoriously vexed hurdle of having their surrender accepted and were hustled out of the back of the house through more SS troops standing by to renew the attack and onto trucks for the first stage of the journey to Stalag IV-B near Mühlberg in south-eastern Germany.59 Some paratroopers tried to evade capture by going it alone, but not all succeeded in reaching the temporary safety of the Rhine Pavilion. Private John Hall, a Bren gunner with Sergeant Manser’s 7 Platoon, decided to try and swim the Lower Rhine, and after discarding his weapon and webbing somehow made his way down to the riverbank unscathed. He was waylaid there by a paratrooper who had been wounded in the foot: ‘I removed his boot - a bloody mess, I thought - then I gave him a morphine injection. As I started to bandage him up, I suddenly heard a voice. Looking up, I saw a German SS, a light machine-gun pointing at me…Perhaps he thought I was a medical orderly…I didn’t ask.’60
Colonel Fitch had followed in the wake of the 1st Battalion for around 250 yards when casualties from the latter began to pass back through the advancing 3rd Battalion. He then attempted to provide fire support for Dobie’s unit and when this proved impossible owing to thick vegetation he personally reconnoitred an alternative location higher up the slope to the left rear, but that too suffered from restricted visibility. In the meantime his Battalion was also losing men to German fire, although the Germans initially concentrated mainly on Dobie’s men, and the 3rd Battalion casualties may therefore have been caused by overshoots.
The situation changed drastically for the worse at 07:30 when, with Dobie’s attack contained, the Germans turned their full attention to the 3rd Battalion, raking its exposed position with fire from mortars and automatic weapons; the 20mm guns once again proved especially deadly. Private George Marsh from the Battalion Signals Platoon recalled a single 20mm round removing a friend’s arm. While the unit War Diary assumed the fire came from armoured cars, it may have been from the light flak guns emplaced in the brickworks across the river, which had a panoramic view of every inch of the riverside killing ground.61 By the time Fitch returned from a second unsuccessful reconnaissance the fire was so heavy that the Battalion was being destroyed in place, so he called together his surviving officers – Adjutant Captain Ernest Seccombe, second-in-command Major Alan Bush and Intelligence Officer Lieutenant Alexis Vedeniapine – for what was to be his final O Group as commander of the 3rd Parachute Battalion.
Sitting at the most forward point of the 3rd Battalion’s advance with his back to the bursts as German mortars systematically quartered the slope, Fitch calmly ordered that ‘every officer and man would make his way back…by the best way he could. No question of fieldcraft this; the whole area seemed covered by fire and the only hope of getting out safely was by speed.’62 The officers were then dismissed to spread the word and supervise where necessary. Major Bush recalled finding ‘about thirty of our men and told them to run straight back to the pavilion. One or two were badly injured in the arms or shoulders, and I told these to go straight up the slope to St Elizabeth’s Hospital…I expected to see the Colonel and the other officers in the pavilion soon after, but they didn’t arrive.’63 In fact Bush was the only participant of the O Group to survive unscathed. Captain Seccombe lost both legs to a mortar bomb shortly after ordering Private George Marsh from the Battalion Signals Platoon to retune to the BBC for news of the relief force before moving on: ‘I had the earphones on but could still hear a large explosion behind me. A mortar bomb had fallen and blown his [Seccombe’s] legs off. I was sickened by the sight but ran over the road on which the 20-millimetre gun was firing and found some medics, who brought a stretcher.’64 Colonel Fitch was killed by another mortar bomb that also drove splinters into Lieutenant Vedeniapine’s chest and back; the seriously wounded Intelligence Officer nonetheless appears to have made it back to the Pavilion area under his own steam.65 On reaching the Battalion rendezvous Major Bush set about rallying the survivors of the approximately 140 men who had withdrawn silently from north of the Utrechtsestraatweg in the early hours of the morning, but he was only able to locate a slightly wounded Captain Dorrien-Smith, Captain Cox from the 1st Parachute Squadron, around twenty unwounded men and a number of wounded in adjacent houses; these included A Company’s Sergeant Major Watson and Lieutenant Vedeniapine. On hearing the latter’s report, Major Bush immediately extended his search to the open area east of the Pavilion in an effort to locate Fitch’s body and any other survivors from the attack. In the process he was cut off by German troops but evaded capture to regain British lines in Oosterbeek on Thursday 21 September.66
The attacks into the western outskirts of Arnhem in the early morning of Tuesday 19 September can justifiably be considered the death ride of the 1st Parachute Brigade, although it was remarkable in itself that the participating units were able to continue for as long as they did. Dobie’s 1st Parachute Battalion had been fighting and moving virtually non-stop for the thirty-six hours or so since Major Timothy’s R Company had bumped Hauptmann Weber’s patrol from 213 Nachrichten Regiment just north of Wolfheze at 17:00 on 17 September. During that time the 548 men the Battalion had taken into Holland were reduced to around 150 excluding stragglers, and while the 3rd Parachute Battalion had spent less time on the move, it too had been reduced from 588 to around 140 men over the same period, again excluding stragglers plus C Company at the Arnhem bridge.67 These losses were incurred in some of the most intense and sustained close-quarter fighting of the war, yet the two Battalions not only remained functional but continued to pursue their primary mission after their commanders had been killed or captured and virtually up to the point of extinction; by 09:00 all that remained of the 1st Parachute Battalion was approximately seven officers including padre Captain Talbot Watkins and 200 stragglers and men from the second lift gathered by the Battalion Motor Transport Officer Lieutenant John Williams. At 09:30 Williams conducted a personal reconnaissance into Arnhem using an armed Jeep likely commandeered from the 1st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron, accompanied by Lieutenants Leslie Curtis and Albert Turrell. Ninety minutes later he launched yet another attack along the Onderlangs that was subsumed by a stronger German advance moving in the opposite direction.68
All this shows that there was little wrong with the 1st Airborne Division at the battalion level or below – all was achieved in isolation, with little to no guidance or support from further up the chain of command. Had Dobie not been tasked with an arguably needless peripheral mission and had Fitch been allowed to get on without interference, it is highly likely that the 1st and 3rd Parachute Battalions would also have inadvertently exploited the flaws in the initial German counter-deployments and reached the Arnhem road bridge like Frost’s 2nd Parachute Battalion and the 1st Parachute Brigade column. With a full brigade on the objective, the Arnhem portion of Operation MARKET might well have turned out rather differently. Instead, a combination of inadequate if not inept planning, needless micro-management and deficient leadership squandered the advantage conferred by enemy errors and in the process doomed the 1st Parachute Brigade’s constituent units to fight themselves to destruction against a skilfully executed defence that proved impervious to focussed aggression and raw courage alike.
As we have seen, the first stage of II SS Panzerkorps’ strategy to counter the 1st Airborne Division had been to block and contain the interlopers along the line of the Amsterdamseweg and in the western outskirts of Arnhem, in order to seal off the Arnhem road bridge. This had been achieved by the morning of 19 September and 9
SS Panzer Division therefore moved to the second stage by launching a counter-attack to push the Airborne incursion back to the west. The catalyst was likely not the destruction of the 1st Parachute Brigade as the Germans were not privy to the detail of the British situation at that time, but to the arrival of reinforcements and specifically a detachment from Sturmgeschütze Brigade 280 commanded by Major Kurt Kühme. An independent Heer unit with an integral panzergrenadier component and recovery unit, the Brigade had been withdrawn to rest and refit in the vicinity of Apenrade in Denmark after suffering severe losses in the fighting at Tarnopol in the Ukraine in April 1944, and was en route to Aachen by rail when orders from Heeresgruppe B diverted Major Kühme’s kompanie to Arnhem.69 It is unclear precisely where Major Kühme and his vehicles detrained but the convoy, consisting of seven Sturmgeschütze (StuG) IIIs, three more heavily armed Sturmhaubitze (StuH) 42s and a lone Sd.Kfz. 251/8 ambulance half-track, road marched into Arnhem from the north. After travelling under the Zijpse Poort bridge and across the Willemsplein and Nieuweplein, the convoy then turned right onto the eastern end of the Utrechtsestraat, where the armoured vehicles lined out nose-to-tail along the leafy suburban street just 700 yards or so east of the Municipal Museum. The precise time the assault guns arrived on the Utrechtsestraat is also unclear but shadows on photographs of their drive through the city show it was well after sunrise, which occurred at 06:16.70 From there Hauptsturmführer Schwarz, 9 SS Panzer Division’s Chief-of-Staff, parcelled the vehicles out, with one three-vehicle Zug being assigned to Kampfgruppe Harder down on the riverside Onderlangs and a second to Kampfgruppe Möller a few hundred yards further up the Utrechtsestraat. The arrival of these vehicles represented a step-change in the capability available to the various kampfgruppen manning the southern end of Sturmbannführer Spindler’s Sperrlinie. Hitherto a general lack of weapons heavier than light flak had obliged them to attempt to take on their British opponents face-to-face, an extremely hazardous and potentially costly process in the face of such an aggressive and ferocious foe. The arrival of armoured vehicles mounting weapons of 75mm and 105mm calibre conferred the ability to stand off and simply demolish the occupied buildings with impunity.
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