While the 2nd South Staffords were consolidating their firm base in and around the Municipal Museum Lieutenant-Colonel McCardie had set about obtaining reinforcements from the 11th Parachute Battalion, despatching a runner to bring Lieutenant-Colonel Lea to a meeting on the front steps of the St Elizabeth Hospital. Lea arrived at or shortly before 08:00 with some of his officers and it was decided that the 11th Battalion should move north to the railway cutting and then attack east along it, apparently with a tentative start time of 09:00; the South Staffords were to resume their push along the Utrechtsestraat once the 11th Battalion’s attack had developed. McCardie was joined on the steps by Major Commings and Major Cain who, having finally arrived with the South Staffords’ Main HQ, transport and B Company’s second lift echelon at around 05:00, were looking to rejoin their Battalion; Cain was especially keen to reassume command of B Company. McCardie greeted them with the rather unsettling news that he was running short of officers and inaccurately informed Cain that both Major Phillp and Captain Foot had been killed.71 McCardie then led Cain and Commings east toward the Battalion firm base where they came upon Adjutant John Chapman and a mixed group from the Battalion occupying slit trenches on the corner of either the Bovenover or Sint Elisabethshof. Captain Chapman had occupied the location, apparently on his own initiative, in an effort to suppress German flanking fire interfering with movement along the Utrechtsestraat; McCardie ordered him to abandon that mission and then led the whole group across the road for the shelter of the wooded slope en route to the museum.72
Although the fact was likely hidden by the ambient noise, the breathing space won by the 2nd South Staffords had run out and the battle on the Utrechtsestraat was reigniting. German mortar fire had been growing heavier and at around 08:00 the remnants of D Company holding part of the wooded hollow by the museum were attacked from the south-east by a company-size force. The attack was repulsed but the Germans maintained the pressure by infiltrating small groups through the vegetation on the slope behind the museum, and more especially against the buildings occupied by Major Alan Lane’s A Company on the other side of the Utrechtsestraat.73 Major Cain peeled off from McCardie’s group to join B Company in the hollow where he was greeted by a wounded but very much alive Captain Foot, who informed him that Major Phillp was also alive but had been evacuated for medical treatment. Cheered by the news, Cain did the rounds of his depleted Company before being summoned by runner to the museum, where he joined Colonel McCardie, Major Commings, Major Lane, Captain Chapman and Lieutenant David Longden in
…an empty room for a conference. McCardie’s eyes kept closing and he was clearly burnt out. He did not seem capable of a decision…John Commings said ‘Poor Colonel’…The CO told us of the plan for the 11th Battalion’s attack north of us and it was eventually agreed (but not decided) that we should push on timing our attack to coincide with [the] 11th Battalion. McCardie called David Longden, the Intelligence Officer and, together with the adjutant, Captain Chapman, retired to get out orders for our attack.74
Circumstances were conspiring against Colonel McCardie’s intentions, and not solely from the German perspective. Back at the Hartenstein Hotel Major-General Urquhart had been briefed on the situation within an hour of his tea and shave and it rapidly became apparent that the original Division plan had been almost totally overwhelmed by events. The 1st Airborne Division’s third lift, scheduled to arrive later that day, was a matter of immediate concern because LZ L had not yet been secured by the 7th KOSB and the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade’s DZ K and the supply drop DZ V were both firmly in German hands, the former a mile south of the Arnhem road bridge and the latter a mile or so north-west of Arnhem alongside the Amsterdamseweg. Urquhart’s biography makes much of the fact that his attempt to change the two DZs was frustrated because the radio message failed to get through for some unspecified reason, although the 1st Airborne Division’s signal logs show that links to the War Office, British 1st Airborne Corps HQ and British 2nd Army HQ via the Phantom net were all open and functioning at the time.75 That aside, it is unclear precisely where else the Polish Brigade’s drop could have been diverted to, as all the zones used by the first and second lifts had been abandoned in the pre-planned move to the 1st Airborne’s Phase II positions the previous night and thus lay outwith the Divisional perimeter. Furthermore, had matters in the UK unfolded as planned, the bulk if not all of the third lift would likely have been airborne en route to Holland by the time Urquhart sent his request to change DZs, which would therefore have been too late. In the circumstances the best solution would have been to cancel the third lift altogether, but Hicks and Mackenzie appear to have considered such a decision to be beyond the remit of temporary Division command, and Urquhart was still in self-imposed isolation near the St Elizabeth Hospital at the time the decision needed to be made. As we shall see, bad weather saved Sosabowski’s Brigade for a further two days, but the episode further illustrates the consequences of Urquhart’s wilful separation from the levers of command.
Urquhart’s twofold reaction to events in the vicinity of the St Elizabeth Hospital had the greatest effect on McCardie and the South Staffords. First, after expressing regret at not tarrying to impart some order on the situation at the Rhine Pavilion and thereby second-guessing arguably his first correct decision since landing in Holland, Urquhart decided to despatch Colonel Hilaro Barlow, deputy commander of the 1st Airlanding Brigade, to take control of the effort to break through to the Arnhem road bridge.76 Barlow appears to have been informed of his new appointment by Hicks in person when the latter returned to his Brigade HQ at the Hotel Bilderburg at 09:00. Barlow departed for the St Elizabeth Hospital an hour later in a Jeep accompanied by his batman, Lance-Corporal Raymond Singer. At this point the Airlanding Brigade HQ was packed and standing by to move east to a new location in Oosterbeek and the pair may have narrowly missed being strafed by the German fighters that attacked the assembled transport.77 Colonel Barlow reached the vicinity of the Rhine Pavilion but there his luck ran out. Captain John McCooke from the 2nd South Staffords’ A Company had been sent back to ensure that his Battalion transport did not come forward of the Pavilion and he described what happened:
Colonel Barlow appeared there with his batman and asked me about the situation in front. I decided to go forward with him. Heavy mortaring started, and we made a dash for one of the houses which back onto the river…As I ran, I heard a crash behind me and was slightly injured in the leg by a mortar-bomb fragment. I collapsed in the doorway of the house we were making for. No one followed me in…I went upstairs and looked out of the bedroom window. There I saw what I can only describe as a mess on the pavement – which I presumed was Colonel Barlow – and a dead body behind that which must have been his batman.78
Incidentally, the 2nd South Staffords transport column was eventually guided back to the Divisional HQ area by Lieutenant Lennard Withers MC from Support Company. After a detour to avoid German machine-gun fire from the Mariendaal, the men reached the Hotel Hartenstein where they were allocated an area by the tennis courts at the rear.79
Urquhart’s attempt to impose order on the effort to break through to the Arnhem road bridge was thus undone by Colonel Barlow’s death, and his second action, or reaction, impacted even more directly upon Lieutenant-Colonel McCardie and his Battalion. Concerned at the mounting cost of feeding units into the fight along the Onderlangs and Utrechtsestraat piecemeal, Urquhart decided to halt the process until Barlow had assumed command and clarified the situation. The 11th Parachute Battalion was therefore ordered to remain in place until further orders, the order arriving at Lieutenant-Colonel Lea’s HQ at the St Elizabeth Hospital at approximately 09:00, while preparations for the attack in support the 2nd South Staffords were well underway, with Major David Gilchrist’s A Company deployed on the start line just east of the hospital. As a result the bulk of the 11th Battalion remained in place west of and in front of the hospital awaiting further instructions from Division HQ while Gil
christ and A Company remained isolated without orders or explanation east of the hospital, with Company HQ located on the south side of the Utrechtsestraat and its three platoons in buildings on the north side. Although visibility was severely restricted by a hedgerow and the slope, the position was largely secure from German direct fire but remained vulnerable to mortar fire; one bomb killed Company Sergeant-Major George Ashdown and wounded the Company second-in-command Captain Peter Perse. Gilchrist also made the unwelcome discovery that he was virtually without anti-tank weapons; all the Company’s PIATs and ammunition had been loaded into a trailer for the march from the landing area and the Jeep to which the trailer was attached had been borrowed by the Battalion Padre, Captain Henry Irwin. The PIATs presumably stayed missing as Padre Irwin was killed the following day, and Major Gilchrist was shortly to rue the absence of the weapons.80
Lieutenant-Colonel McCardie and the 2nd South Staffords were left hanging in their firm base around the Municipal Museum, waiting for a supporting attack that never came. Had their opponents remained dormant this might not have been a problem, but as we have seen the Germans were maintaining the pressure against A Company on the north side of the Utrechtsestraat and D Company in the wooded hollow next to the museum, backed by increasingly heavy mortar fire. The latter was countered to some extent by the 2nd South Staffords’ No.1 Mortar Platoon. Major Cain returned from the Battalion O Group to find Lieutenant Reynolds had set up his section of 3-inch mortars in the hollow: ‘They were trying to hit some Jerries who were less than one hundred yards away. Jack [Reynolds] was on top of the monastery (museum) observing and Willie [Captain Willcocks] was shouting fire orders to the mortars. They were taking the secondary charges off the bombs and firing them almost straight up into the air. It was almost as dangerous to us as it was to the Germans.’81 The target was a number of German troops moving along the riverside, who were also engaged by Cain’s B Company with small-arms while CanLoan Lieutenant Albert Boustead led D Company’s 19 Platoon forward to clear the wooded slope behind the Municipal Museum.
Up to this point the 2nd South Staffords had been holding their own, but the scales began to tilt inexorably against them at around 09:00 when Sturmgeschütze Brigade 280 entered the fray. British accounts almost invariably misidentified the unit’s assault guns as tanks, although this was an understandable error in the circumstances and the more so because the StuGs were liberally decked in foliage to deflect the attention of Allied fighter-bombers. The three vehicles allocated to Kampfgruppe Möller moved up to a point on the Utrechtsestraat near the PGEM building a little short of the British positions, where they pivoted left in a herringbone pattern facing out over the wooded slope, although contemporary photographs suggest their view was seriously restricted by the foliage.82 The formation was therefore likely intended to permit the infantry support to deploy unmolested behind the vehicles, and the pause to permit co-ordination with the vehicles allocated to Kampfgruppe Harder down on the riverside, given that the 2nd South Staffords War Diary suggests that the StuGs attacked the British positions on the Utrechtsestraat and lower Onderlangs simultaneously. Lieutenant Russell from the 2nd Parachute Battalion saw the arrival of one of the former from his vantage point in the eastern end of the museum, likely the caretaker’s flat: ‘I suppose it was about mid-morning when I saw the outlines of a large tank through the garden gate. I warned the company commander, who sent a PIAT forward to cover the road; we stayed upstairs. The tank milled around, treating the world in general to bursts of MG and big dollops of gunfire. We were, as yet, untouched.’83 Down on the wooded slope the vehicles were heard before they were seen, as noted by one of the D Company men holding the wooded hollow: ‘We heard a rattling of tank tracks, we had been told on a briefing to expect our tanks on the second day of the operation and it gave our hearts a terrific lift when someone shouted “Our tanks are here!” Imagine our horror when we saw the black crosses painted on them.’84
The 2nd South Staffords had no anti-tank guns to hand because Lieutenant-Colonel McCardie had despatched his eight 6-Pounders back to Division HQ with the rest of the Battalion transport, and the onus for countering the new armoured threat therefore fell on the Battalion’s PIAT gunners. Lieutenant Russell in the Municipal Museum saw the A Company PIAT he had ordered up score a direct hit on a StuG manoeuvring on the Utrechtsestraat, while Lieutenant Georges Dupenois from B Company ‘particularly distinguished himself by his bold use of this weapon’ on the wooded slope behind the museum, where he drove back a StuG firing high-explosive shells into the hollow working in tandem with another, sadly unnamed, PIAT gunner.85 The Germans responded by increasing the volume of mortar fire while the assault guns stood off to reduce the risk from the PIATs but continued to shell the British positions. The fire into the hollow became so intense that Lieutenant Reynolds’ mortar section was obliged temporarily to abandon its weapons; Reynolds himself was injured by a flying branch that broke his pipe and removed his two front teeth.86 Any attempted advance toward the hollow by the StuGs was met by Dupenois and his running mate until the latter was knocked out by a mortar bomb. They had been playing a cat-and-mouse game worked out with Major Cain and the commander of Support Company: ‘Jock Buchanan and I were drawing the fire and trying to get ammunition for Georges…When a tank appeared, we got four Brens firing on it with tracers. That shut the tank up, because the commander couldn’t stand up in the turret. As soon as we let off a Piat at it, we’d move back, and then the German shells would explode below us. We were firing at 100 to 150 yards’ range.’87 At one point Dupenois stood fully exposed to steady his weapon atop a fencepost before scoring a direct hit on the target vehicle’s flank, and he was also involved in a fight against at least one StuG concealed behind convenient hedgerows firing directly on B Company’s positions from the Utrechtsestraat. The target was likely a Zug command vehicle, given Cain described the radio aerial that betrayed its presence as being crowned with ‘a thing like a flue brush’ and while Dupenois’ blind shot missed the target and partially demolished a building behind it, the near miss persuaded the StuG to pull back.88
The 2nd South Staffords’ PIAT gunners thus succeeded in keeping the German armoured vehicles at bay, but while they scored numerous hits their bombs lacked sufficient punch to knock out or even seriously damage the assault guns. Flank hits were absorbed by the vehicles’ schürzen side armour plates and their frontal armour appears to have been impervious, given that Major Kühme’s StuG shrugged off a direct hit to the right of the gun mantlet with just a dent and loss of some zimmerit anti-mine paste; in fact Sturmgeschütze Brigade 280 did not lose its first vehicle until the following day and only after coming up against 6-Pounder guns closer to Oosterbeek.89 The problem for the 2nd South Staffords was that keeping the StuGs at bay rapidly depleted the available stock of PIAT bombs, with Lieutenant Dupenois alone expending an estimated ten to twenty rounds.90 More seriously, while the impact of the PIAT bombs was enough to make the armoured vehicles keep their distance, it did not prevent them from standing off and pumping high-explosive shells into the South Staffords’ positions in the hollow and on the Utrechtsestraat. Slowly but surely, the German pressure began to tell and Lieutenant-Colonel McCardie was obliged to move his HQ to a new location a hundred yards west of the museum; he also approached Major Lane about withdrawing A Company into a tighter perimeter centred on the Municipal Museum and despatched a runner back to the St Elizabeth Hospital to guide Major Wright and C Company forward to the main Battalion location.91
At 10:15 the Germans renewed their attack, having refined their tactics and teamwork. Still wary of the PIATs the StuGs began operating in pairs and the vehicles down on the Onderlangs concentrated their fire on the hollow to cover SS infantry filtering up the wooded slope toward the rear of the museum. B Company was nonetheless able to rebuff the infiltrators with the personal assistance of Major Cain, who spotted one group:
An NCO was beckoning on a section of six or seven who were in line abreast and in enfil
ade to us. I indicated to a Bren gunner who fired and missed them…the NCO moving rapidly out of sight. The rest were beautifully bunched. I grabbed a Bren…layed on the bunch and fired half a magazine. As I fired I could see them crumple up. I then let them have the other half of the magazine and there was no further movement.92
Cain then went in search of more PIAT bombs, the quest carrying him back to Battalion HQ where his description of events in the vicinity of the museum cast doubt on the plan to tighten the Battalion perimeter around it and prompted McCardie to go forward with Cain to see for himself. By this time the hollow was under constant shellfire and German infantry were pressing into the southern edge, as noted by Corporal Perry: ‘Bullets and shells were coming from all directions. We were firing at some Germans who had appeared at the bottom of the dell and had knocked them about badly…the dell was a mess, full of [British] dead and wounded.’93 On reaching the lip of the hollow the two officers were greeted by the gruesome sight of one of Cain’s ‘old originals. Only his head and face were untouched. The rest of him was unrecognisable as human ‒ a straggly mess of churned up, bloody clothing with pieces of dead white flesh here and there. Other pieces of him and his clothing were hanging on nearby bushes.’94 Seeing the hollow was untenable, McCardie gave Cain permission to withdraw and after a brief discussion Cain decided to seek the shelter of buildings on the other side of the Utrechtsestraat behind the houses held by A Company.95 It was at this juncture, between 10:50 and 11:30, that the supply of PIAT bombs finally gave out, removing the South Staffords’ only effective protection against the StuGs.96
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