Arnhem
Page 57
Having departed as 156 Parachute Battalion’s attack toward the Lichtenbeek feature was getting underway, Brigadier Hackett does not appear to have been aware of the deterioration of the situation along the Dreijenseweg as the morning wore on, and consequently applied himself to routine business. Brigade HQ had already moved from the Hotel Buunderkamp at 07:30 to a new location just east of the Wolfheze crossing, trailed thirty minutes later by the rearguard 4th Parachute Squadron RE led by the newly returned Major Perkins; he had dislocated his shoulder on landing and had spent the night in the care of 133 Parachute Field Ambulance.148 On returning to his HQ from Point 565, Hackett was joined at some point between 08:45 and 10:30 by Lieutenant-Colonels Mackenzie and Loder-Symonds, who confirmed the transfer of the 7th KOSB to Hackett’s command and presumably briefed him on the overall situation.149 They also brought news of Urquhart’s recent return and a request for Hackett to visit Division HQ if he ‘was not pressed’, failing which Urquhart would come out to 4th Parachute Brigade HQ later in the day. Although he felt obliged to decline the invitation Hackett welcomed the news of Urquhart’s return, commenting at the time ‘that things were now looking tidier’, and used the same phrase in a post-war interview: ‘My feelings were that Roy [Urquhart] was back and a firm hand was in charge at last. Things were looking tidier. I had no quarrel with the conduct of operations now.’150 Quite how much of Hackett’s satisfaction stemmed from the fact that Urquhart’s return removed the irksome necessity of serving under Hicks is uncertain.
Hackett then set about bringing the remainder of his Brigade forward. The precise timing is unclear but 133 Parachute Field Ambulance was ordered to move from Wolfheze sanatorium to join 181 Airlanding Field Ambulance at the Hotel Tafelberg in Oosterbeek. Brigade HQ moved again at 11:00, to a track junction in woods just south of the Arnhem‒Ede railway line 500 yards or so south-west of Johannahoeve and was ‘badly strafed’ en route by German fighters, albeit without suffering any casualties.151 German aircraft also overflew the 4th Parachute Squadron RE leading Captain Henry Brown, commanding No. 3 Troop, to believe his unit was under attack from
…three or four German Messerschmitts. There was a certain amount of panic. Those sappers close to me jumped into a convenient bomb crater. I did too and we kept our heads down. I thought I had taken the right action [but] the planes were firing at 156 Battalion which was about two miles ahead of us. There had been no need to take cover…I resolved from now on to make some attempt at taking sensible action under fire.152
With the excitement over, the Parachute Squadron followed in the wake of Brigade HQ at 11:30, moving along the sandy track paralleling the Arnhem‒Ede railway line.153 Captain Brown commandeered an abandoned farm cart discovered at the side of the track to ease his men’s burden of No. 75 Hawkins Mines: ‘Because we were rather heavily loaded with small anti-tank mines (each man carried two in his pouches) I ordered everyone in my Troop to load up the cart with the mines. They were about the size of a thickish paperback book…In all there must have been about sixty mines each containing about two pounds of explosive. It was an easy task for three men to haul the cart along the firm level sandy track.’154 Brown also noted a ‘considerable amount of firing ahead’ and the unsettling sight of casualties from the fight on the Dreijenseweg being ferried back aboard Bren Carriers. The Squadron’s destination was a track junction by a small wood alongside the railway line, just under a mile east of the Wolfheze crossing, and after a pause the Sappers were ordered to dig in along the northern edge of the wood, facing out across LZ L; No. 3 Troop left its farm cart of Hawkins mines in cover just off the track while Captain Brown liaised with a unit of Glider Pilots occupying adjacent positions. With that, the 4th Parachute Brigade, along with the remainder of the 1st Airborne Division, was in position to await the arrival of the third lift.
12
D Plus 2
12:00 to 23:59 Tuesday 19 September 1944
By midday on Tuesday 19 September 1944 the bulk of the 1st Airborne Division was collectively centred on Oosterbeek, with individual units either in the process of moving on Arnhem or occupying Phase II positions east of the landing areas used by the first and second lifts. The exception to this was the 1st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron, the bulk of which, Captain Michael Grubb’s A Troop and Captain Park’s D Troop, was occupying a mile-long observation line in the Doorwerthsche Bosch forest 1,000 yards or so east of Heelsum. Initially, things remained quiet in the northern sector and Captain Grubb led a small patrol to a nearby group of houses at the request of an elderly Dutch civilian to deal with an alleged collaborator; the target had disappeared and Grubb and his men had to make do with the hospitality of his more patriotic neighbours. At around 14:00 a German bicycle bataillon appeared on the Utrechtseweg but turned south into the forest before reaching A Troop’s section of the line, apart from a party of five stragglers who missed the turning and were ambushed by Lieutenant John Stevenson’s 1 Section. Two survivors hid in the roadside foliage and were taken prisoner by Trooper Kenneth Hope when his Section moved up to render assistance: ‘One of the Germans had extended one arm only, and I thought “My God, the bastard’s giving us a Nazi salute!” Then I realised that he was shot through the shoulder and upper arm.’1 The pair may have been those despatched back to Captain Allsop’s Tactical HQ for interrogation where they arrived at 15:30.2 Another group of Germans on foot was ambushed nearby later in the afternoon, but the trap was sprung too early and they escaped unscathed apart from abandoning a wheeled machine-gun of some kind in the road. Further south, D Troop fought two sharp encounters in the vicinity of its Troop HQ location near the Koninginne Laan beginning at 13:00. Thereafter, matters developed into a stealthy and potentially deadly game of hide-and-seek for the reconnaissance soldiers as large numbers of German troops moved past the deployed Sections in the dense undergrowth, as Lance-Corporal Robert Thomson recalled: ‘Most of the time we couldn’t see the Germans at all, but we knew that they were there because we could hear them moving through the woods all around. They made a lot of noise’.3
Captain Allsop had established the Squadron’s Tactical HQ just inside the Division perimeter adjacent to the 1st Airlanding Light Regiment’s gun pits near the Hotel Bilderberg, from where it relayed reports from the elements farther west to Division HQ, although the location proved to be only marginally less hazardous than the front line. When a reported ten Luftwaffe fighters strafed the area at 13:50 the Squadron War Diary noted an ‘intense barrage of Sten gun fire from R.A.s ‒ endangers Tac HQ more than the planes’.4
Captain Allsop left his HQ at 12:30 to escort Major-General Urquhart to the Arnhem‒Ede railway line en route to 4th Parachute Brigade HQ, and moved from there to the woods north-west of the Division perimeter at 14:15 in an effort to re-establish radio communication with Captain John Hay’s C Troop. Links to the latter had been lost shortly after it had left the Squadron in order to reconnoitre the Amsterdamseweg north of Wolfheze at around 07:00. The third lift supply drop came in while the signaller worked and one Short Stirling reportedly crashed nearby after being hit by German anti-aircraft fire. After forty minutes or so the attempt was abandoned and Allsop returned to the Tactical HQ location on the Utrechtseweg near the junction with the Wolfhezeweg at 15:00.5
Although Captain Allsop had no way of knowing it, C Troop would likely have been unable to respond even had radio contact been established. After being prevented from reaching the Amsterdamseweg via the Wolfhezeweg by German mortar fire, Captain Hay’s force sidestepped to the west and succeeded in gaining sight of the road from the dense woodland a few hundred yards from the Planken Wambuis. The Amsterdamseweg proved to be full of German troops and vehicles, some of them armoured, moving toward Arnhem. While there was no actual contact, the sound of movement in the woods to the rear suggested the Troop’s line of retreat had also been blocked. The degree to which this was the case became apparent when the third lift aircraft appeared at shortly before 16:00 and the woods erupted in gunfire, a
s 9 Section’s Sergeant David Christie recalled: ‘We must have come right through and passed by several of their positions, and it left us in no doubt that to go back by the way we had come was now definitely out.’6 Gambling that the Germans on the Amsterdamseweg would be preoccupied and that the noise of the aircraft and anti-aircraft fire would mask the sound of the Jeeps, Captain Hay decided on a bold dash eastward down the main road for the mile-distant junction with the Wolfhezeweg. Jeeps were thus swiftly loaded, weapons checked and with a final order of ‘If fired upon, don’t stop ‒ keep going,’ C Troop’s seven Jeeps crunched and bounced their way out of the woods and onto the Amsterdamseweg with Captain Hay’s vehicle in the lead. Next came Troop Sergeant Fred Winder’s Jeep, followed by Lieutenant Hubert Pearson and then 9 Section’s vehicles driven by Lieutenant Cecil Bowles and Sergeant David Christie, with Lieutenant Ralph Foulkes and 7 Section bringing up the rear. The little convoy was soon moving at speed and matters proceeded well for the first half mile or so until the relatively open heathland flanking the road gave way to a beech wood, where the 7th KOSB’s A Company had ambushed the motorised Quick Reaction Force from SS Wacht Bataillon 3 in the early evening of 17 September. At that point a small group of gesticulating Airborne soldiers appeared in the trees at the roadside and seconds later the head of the convoy ran full tilt into a hail of small-arms fire from the left-hand side of the road.
Hit numerous times when the ambush was initiated, Captain Hay’s Jeep swerved back and forth across the carriageway before careering off the road and colliding with a tree; the fate of the passengers is unclear. The remaining drivers speeded up and began jinking across the width of the road in an effort to throw off the enemy’s aim while their passengers returned fire with every weapon they could muster. Sergeant Christie hunched down in the driver’s seat so Lance-Corporal Bert Palmer could fire the vehicle’s Vickers K machine gun across the width of the vehicle and over his head. The return fire made little difference, as firing with any accuracy from the wildly manoeuvring Jeeps was virtually impossible and because of the sheer number of ambushers; Sergeant Christie recalled them lining the road so closely he could have spat upon them and Trooper James Cooke recalled there were ‘hundreds of them, laid three deep on each side of the road’.7 This suggests the ambush was a hasty affair organised by a passing unit rather than a deliberate planned arrangement, but the technicality made little difference to the men on the receiving end. Lieutenant Pearson’s Jeep disintegrated, possibly after being struck by a large calibre round, scattering human and mechanical debris in all directions. Next in line, Lieutenant Bowles’ vehicle was struck by a concentrated burst of fire that knocked out the engine, lightly wounded Bowles in the foot, knees and hand and may also have killed Lance-Corporal Alan Baker and Trooper Frederick Brawn travelling in the back.8 Bowles deliberately ran the Jeep off the road into a ditch and managed to escape into the woods despite his wounded foot, while an unconscious trooper, Gerry Fergus, was thrown clear by the impact. Sergeant Christie was obliged to run his Jeep onto the grass verge to avoid collision when Bowles’ vehicle suddenly decelerated, narrowly missing a concrete milepost. Trooper Raymond McSkimmings was hit in the head and killed outright at around the same time; his body was thrown into the roadway by Christie’s evasive manoeuvres.9 The final two Jeeps in the convoy managed to avoid the ambush altogether. Seeing events unfolding to his front, Lieutenant Foulkes was able to lead his Section off the road up a convenient firebreak, where the shot-up vehicles from SS Wacht Bataillon 3 had been dragged clear of the road.
Of the five Jeeps that entered the ambush zone, only Sergeants Winder’s and Christie’s vehicles passed out of the far side, the former by some fluke totally unscathed. Both reported to the Squadron Rear HQ location at 16:20 without further incident.10 QM Lieutenant Collier was present when the survivors arrived: ‘They were very, very shaken, and I remember sitting them down with their backs to some iron railings and pumping rum and strong tea into them.’11 Trooper Cooke discovered Trooper McSkimmings’ brain matter spattered across his vehicle’s map cases and Bren. Trooper Stanley Tickle from Sergeant Winder’s Jeep appears to have been so traumatised that he drifted away unnoticed and was killed several days later while wandering in a dazed state.12 By this point the Breedeweg observation line had begun to outlive its usefulness. At the northern end of A Troop’s sector Lieutenant Galbraith’s 2 Section was strafed by half-a-dozen German fighters at 15:00, apparently without suffering casualties, and an hour later D Troop’s high-stakes game of hide-and-seek came to an abrupt end when the Germans attacked the Squadron’s locations at the south end of the Breedeweg, obliging Captain Park to withdraw north-east along the Italiaanseweg to the relative safety of the 1st Border’s D Company location just south of the Utrechtseweg, before reaching the Squadron Rear HQ at 17:00.13 Captain Allsop ordered A Troop back to his Tactical HQ location at the same time. Thirty minutes later both elements also withdrew to the Hotel Hartenstein. Allsop was summoned to Division HQ on arrival and at 18:00 A and D Troops were despatched to provide outposts for the north side of the Division perimeter on the line of the Arnhem‒Ede railway, A Troop at the north near the end of the Oranjeweg, north-east of the Ommershof position occupied by the 21st Independent Parachute Company, and D at the north-eastern corner of Oosterbeek between the Lebretweg and Schelmseweg. Captain Grubb’s Troop were back at the Rear HQ at 22:00 after an uneventful stint of observation apart from suffering three wounded to a German mortar bomb and Troop Sergeant Henry Venes puncturing a Jeep tyre with a negligent discharge from his Sten gun. Captain Park and D Troop had a more eventful time inflicting a number of casualties on a German patrol on the Schelmseweg at around 19:00 and observing a number of others thereafter, before withdrawing to the main Squadron location at 23:30.14
While the Reconnaissance Squadron was performing its tasks west of the Division perimeter, the 1st Border continued to enjoy a relatively quiet time in the woods just west of Oosterbeek. C Company’s position around the junction of the Utrechtseweg and Wolfhezeweg came under intermittent mortar fire, although the only casualty appears to have been 17 Platoon’s Airborne handcart; according to a Lance-Corporal Payne the cart, containing the unit’s reserve ammunition and two boxes of compo rations, was destroyed by a direct hit in the early afternoon.15 A Company and Battalion HQ were strafed by a dozen Luftwaffe fighters at 15:00, again without sustaining casualties. A number of supply panniers from the RAF resupply mission reportedly landed in the Battalion area an hour later, two narrowly missing Lance-Corporal Payne and a Private Braithwaite. The pair had been despatched with a Bren to cover C Company’s flank and were engaged in knocking loopholes in the walls of a boiler house near some large greenhouses when ‘all hell was let loose. Two containers on the end of red parachutes came crashing into the greenhouses.’16 At 17:30 Battalion HQ relocated to a new position in woods 500 yards to the south-east for reasons that are unclear and ninety minutes later elements from Kampfgruppe von Tettau made contact with all four Company locations.17
Despite making fairly good progress in the area of Renkum and Heelsum in the afternoon of 18 September, Kampfgruppe von Tettau’s attack on the 1st Airborne Division’s landing area had been brought to an abrupt halt by the collapse of SS Wacht Bataillon 3 at the hands of the British second lift on DZ Y, which in turn left the German left flank dangerously exposed. It then took Generalleutnant von Tettau’s three subordinate Kampfgruppen the whole of 19 September to reorganise and feel their way across the now abandoned landing area. In the north SS Wacht Bataillon 3’s replacement Sicherungs Regiment 26, a two-Bataillon military police unit commanded by a Major Knoche, was tasked to advance east along the Amsterdamseweg accompanied by three Flammpanzer B2 (f) tanks attached from Oberleutnant Albert May’s Panzer Kompanie 224. May’s unit had arrived at the scene of the action at 16:30 after an eighty-mile road march from its base at Naaldwijk near Den Haag. It was equipped with sixteen captured French Char B tanks, fourteen of them modified by replacing the glac
is-mounted short 75mm gun with a flame-thrower, and a single Somua S35 that served as May’s command vehicle.18 In the centre of the advance SS Bataillon Eberwein had been tasked to advance along the line of the Arnhem‒Ede railway and secure Wolfheze, while Standartenführer Lippert and SS Unterführerschule ‘Arnheim’ cleared Heelsum and pushed into the woods running east to Heveadorp and Oosterbeek. Some of Panzer Kompanie 224’s vehicles may also have been attached to the latter two units at this point, but it was likely Lippert’s men that attacked the Reconnaissance Squadron’s D Troop and made contact with the 1st Border’s various Company perimeters at 19:00.19
The contacts were easily rebuffed and thus likely reconnaissance probes at best, but they highlighted a potentially serious flaw in the 1st Border’s dispositions. The Battalion’s four Companies were strung along a two-and-a-half-mile line running south-west from A Company’s position around the junction of the Valkenberglaan and the Graaf van Rechterenweg just short of the Arnhem‒Ede railway line, to B Company’s perimeter around the junction of the riverside Fonteinallee and the northward-looping Italiaanseweg around a mile west of Heveadorp. In the centre, C Company was dug in on the Utrechtseweg at its junction with the Wolfhezenweg, 1,500 yards from A Company, with D Company located in the woods 500 yards to its south-west. These locations were too far apart to provide mutual support and their relative isolation and the density of the surrounding woodland also rendered them vulnerable to German infiltration. Major Cousens therefore ordered a withdrawal to shorten the Battalion line at some point after 19:00, which involved pulling B, C and D Companies back abreast of A Company on a line running south along the Valkenberglaan (Valkenberg Avenue), across the Utrechtseweg and along the Van Borsselenweg down to the Lower Rhine. As the most far-flung unit Major Tom Armstrong’s B Company moved first, following a roundabout route that involved marching eastward through Heveadorp’s darkened streets then north through D and then C Companies, locations before striking south again along the Van Borsselenweg to the junction with the Benedendorpsweg, 300 yards or so north of the river. There B Company dug in, apart from a single platoon detached to establish a position overlooking the riverside Veerweg 500 yards west of the main perimeter. D Company followed, establishing a perimeter on the Van Borsselenweg midway between the Utrechtsestraatweg and B Company’s location, while C Company set in around the Utrechtseweg‒Van Borsselenweg crossroads. The new positions were still less than ideal, with C and D Companies occupying thick woods and B Company facing the same with the houses and gardens of the western outskirts of Oosterbeek to its back, but the move was completed by 22:45 and the Companies despatched patrols to dominate the approaches to their new locations.20