Arnhem

by William F Buckingham

  While the 1st Border was busy reorganising its frontage a more determined foe was finally putting paid to the 1st Parachute Brigade’s attempt to push into Arnhem along the Utrechtseweg on the east side of the 1st Airborne Division’s congealing perimeter. The early morning attacks along the riverside Onderlangs road had reduced the 1st Parachute Battalion to around 200 survivors and stragglers rallied by Lieutenant John Williams, the Battalion Motor Transport Officer who, apparently undaunted, promptly set about organising another attack. Launched at 11:00, this effort progressed for a hundred yards or so before running into elements of Kampfgruppe Harder moving in the opposite direction in the face of which the paratroopers were obliged to withdraw, first to area of the Rhine Pavilion at 12:30, and again to the crossroads of the Utrechtsestraatweg and Diependalstraat 400 yards west of the Onderlangs junction, at 14:00. There they hastily set about preparing the surrounding buildings for defence. The 3rd Parachute Battalion was even more badly reduced, to around sixty men led by Captain Geoffrey Dorrien-Smith and Captain Cecil Cox from the 1st Parachute Squadron RE, augmented by a party of 120 men from across the 1st Parachute Brigade gathered up by Lieutenant William Fraser, the 3rd Battalion’s Liaison Officer. This force joined the 1st Battalion group at the crossroads at some point after 14:00 along with four 6-Pounders and one 17-Pounder gun from the 1st Airlanding Anti-tank Battery.21 However, while Kampfgruppe Harder may have been responsible for blunting the final British attack along the Onderlangs, the SS unit’s mission was supporting and staying abreast of Kampfgruppe Möller’s advance on the high ground on its right flank, rather than pursuing the paratroopers westward. It was likely this stricture that permitted the remnants of the 1st and 3rd Parachute Battalions their relative breathing space to withdraw and reorganise.

  From mid to late morning the focus of the fighting therefore shifted up the slope from the Onderlangs to the Utrechtsestraat, where the 2nd South Staffords were facing attacks on their firm base in and around the museum from Kampfgruppen Harder and Möller and more seriously, six assault guns from Sturmgeschütze Brigade 280; Battalion HQ and parts of A and B Companies were in the museum proper, the remainder of B Company and D Company held a large wooded hollow on the slope to the west and the bulk of A Company occupied three houses facing the museum on the other side of the Utrechtsestraat. The glider soldiers rebuffed repeated attacks by German infantry and succeeded in keeping the StuGs at bay with PIATs until some point between 10:50 and 11:30 when the supply of PIAT bombs ran out. Major Cain from B Company made this unwelcome discovery whilst seeking a resupply, when the CSM of Support Company ‘bluntly informed him that there were none left in the whole area’.22 By this point German fire from the Onderlangs side had rendered the wooded hollow untenable and the survivors were withdrawn across the Utrechtsestraat and behind the houses held by A Company. Major Cain had sought and received permission for the withdrawal from Colonel McCardie, although one source suggests that Chaplain Buchanan was involved as well.23 Whoever was involved in the decision, the withdrawal was covered by CanLoan Lieutenant Kenneth Taylor and a handful of men from 11 Platoon equipped with one or possibly two Bren guns, although moving to A Company’s location proved be little if any improvement; the house occupied by Lieutenant Alan Barker and 8 Platoon for example was on fire, ‘with the roof and one side burning fiercely although the men were still firing back from the unburnt portion of the house’.24 The withdrawal from the hollow may also have allowed a large group of SS to enter the Municipal Museum from the rear, possibly via a breach in the outer wall created by shellfire. The interlopers were confronted by an unsuspecting Sergeant Norman Howes from A Company:

  I went downstairs to check on the ammo supply and spoke to CSM Vic Williams…I remounted the wooden steps to the first floor to my platoon position…imagine my shock on seeing, instead of my platoon, German troops, two of them facing me as I entered the room, each with rifles in hand…I weighed up the odds and threw myself back down the steps. At the bottom was an upright piano…I got down behind it. At least one grenade was thrown, and the two Germans then came down the steps to check me out. I shot the first; I am not sure if I hit the second as he got up the steps. I shouted to the Dutch people who were there that the Germans were in the building and reported to CSM Williams in the corridor.25

  The SS were prevented from reinforcing their lodgement by fire from the A Company men on the opposite side of the Utrechtsestraat, but they were helpless to prevent the StuGs standing off and pounding the museum. Lieutenant David Russell and his party from the 2nd Parachute Battalion watched one assault gun making its way along Utrechtsestraat pumping shells into the houses around the museum and then into their position in the caretakers quarters at the east end of the building: ‘Up came another tank in our rear and started on our building, the first two rounds taking off the living room which we had just left.’26 The German shellfire rapidly rendered the museum untenable. Sergeant Howes intercepted half-a-dozen unarmed men from his platoon attempting to flee and directed them to collect new weapons from the pile discarded by the wounded at the entrance to the cellar RAP, but the group were prevented from taking shelter below by Chaplain Buchanan looking to protect the RAP’s neutral status.27 Despite this, the defenders still on their feet do appear to have ended up fighting among the wounded, and at least some of the latter were less than impressed. Corporal Arthur Stretton from D Company recalled the wounded’ were on the ground floor with us’ while Private Montgomery from A Company recalled being forced ‘from the upper floors of the museum down to the cellar. Here the floor was covered in dead and wounded…we continued to fire on the Jerries from time to time. Unfortunately the fire returned was twice as much as we put out and the wounded shouted things like “Leave the bastards alone”!’28 By this point the writing was on what remained of the wall and Lieutenant Russell described the end:

  I had a quick conference at the foot of the stairs with the Staffords’ company commander and other officers; the ground floor was full of wounded. Were we to fight on with small arms against tanks, try to break out, or surrender? We decided that as our object…was impossible and as the building was being systematically demolished and there was nowhere to break out to, we should surrender. I chucked my Sten over a hedge, buried my pistol, and walked out with a handkerchief.29

  With the Municipal Museum taken, the Germans continued to push along the Utrechtsestraat killing, capturing or driving back the rest of the 2nd South Staffords. The houses opposite the museum were cleared so effectively that ‘no one from A Coy on the north side of the road got away.’30 Lieutenant Jack Reynolds from No.1 Mortar Platoon went into captivity with a number of men from his unit in some style, defiantly giving an SS Propagandakompanie cameraman filming the event an emphatic V-sign and in the process creating one of Operation MARKET’s most enduring images. Next to be overrun was the 2nd South Staffords Battalion HQ, which had been moved back a hundred yards or so from the museum ; according to the unit War Diary it ‘disappeared completely and it is believed, although still unconfirmed, that they were run down by a tank while in the act of withdrawing’.31 In fact, Colonel McCardie had been caught moving in the opposite direction after observing two StuGs driving unmolested down the Utrechtsestraat: ‘I was trying to get to A Company, to find out why the hell they weren’t shooting at those tanks, and I suppose that something must have fired at me. At any rate, I found myself under about two feet of earth with two Germans pointing Schmeissers at me.’32 McCardie had vowed never to be taken prisoner but in fact the only officer to escape from what he later described as ‘the South Staffs’ Waterloo’ was Major Cain.33 Driven out of the building he occupied with other survivors of the fight in the dell by fire from likely the same pair of assault guns that had attracted Colonel McCardie’s attention, Cain took shelter in the deep air-raid trenches occupied by Captain Chapman and his mixed group earlier, accompanied by a Corporal Perry and two other men. The group became separated when an approaching StuG plastered the area of the tr
enches from fifty yards. Corporal Perry and his two companions made a break for it and reached the edge of the railway cutting before working their way west to the relative safety of Oosterbeek. Cain rolled over and over until he fell over the lip of a twenty-foot drop into the yard of the St Elizabeth Hospital. The impact knocked him out for ten minutes, after which he made his way through the hospital building to British-held territory, where he linked up with the South Staffords’ uncommitted C Company just west of the Rhine Pavilion.34

  Cain had also passed a warning of what was coming to the 11th Parachute Battalion’s A Company en route; the paratroopers were still holding their lonely vigil on the start line for the cancelled supporting attack just east of the St Elizabeth Hospital, as Major Gilchrist recalled: ‘Some of the South Staffs fell back through us. I met Major Cain, who said, “The tanks are coming; give me a Piat.” I had to apologize that we hadn’t any. So the South Staffs disappeared down the hill behind us, hotly pursued by German tanks and infantry. We were outflanked and couldn’t engage the tanks, but we were engaging the infantry.’35 As the Germans had refined their co-operation, this merely attracted the attention of the StuGs, and their fire soon obliged A Company to abandon its position adjacent to the railway cutting. Major Gilchrist and around twenty men took shelter in the same deep air-raid trenches used by Major Cain, pursued by the StuGs, which again closed to under fifty yards to pound the trapped paratroopers. Attempts to engage the vehicles with Gammon bombs were unsuccessful and after fifteen minutes of absorbing German fire with no means to reply, Gilchrist ordered his group to make a break for the railway cutting: ‘That was quite hairy, because the railway cutting was fifty or sixty feet deep. There was a German tank on a bridge over the railway further up, shooting down the railway. We were young and fit in those days and we moved like hell, down the bank, over the rails and up the other side. A few men were hit by the tank’s machine gun, but most of us got across.’36 The respite proved short-lived, for the area north of the cutting was not held by elements of the 4th Parachute Brigade as Gilchrist had assumed but by the Germans, likely elements of SS Panzer FlaK Abteilung 9, and Gilchrist’s little band were obliged to surrender. Most of A Company was also captured and only Lieutenant Arthur Vickers from 1 Platoon and a handful of men managed to break through to British-held territory.37

  The destruction of the bulk of the 2nd South Staffords and Major Gilchrist’s A Company appears to have been complete by the beginning of the afternoon, given that at around 12:00 the 11th Parachute Battalion’s HQ received ‘a message to the effect that the attack on the [Arnhem] bridge had been repulsed, and that the German armour was sweeping round to the North to cut us off’.38 The news prompted Lieutenant-Colonel Lea to redeploy his B Company to cover the Battalion’s left flank facing the railway cutting and Major Guy Blacklidge and his men duly occupied the buildings covering a crossroads north-west of the St Elizabeth Hospital, likely the junction of the Alexanderstraat and the Oranjestraat leading to a bridge across the railway cutting; Major Blacklidge emphasised the importance of the Company’s mission by ordering his men to ‘grenade all enemy tanks and shoot up all infantry’. The move came in the midst of other preparations. At 11:00 Colonel Lea had received new instructions from Division HQ, ordering him to launch a new attack in support of the 4th Parachute Brigade’s advance into Arnhem along the Amsterdamseweg. The attack involved moving north across the Arnhem‒Ede railway cutting, lining out along the Heijenoordseweg linking the railway line and the Amsterdamseweg and then attacking west to secure a wooded ridge referred to as the Heijenoord-Diependaal feature by the British.39 Lea also decided to secure Den Brink on his left flank to act as a pivot for his attack, and he co-opted the remainder of the 2nd South Staffords to carry out the task. As we shall see, the South Staffords did indeed end up acting as a pivot for the 11th Battalion, but not quite in the way Lea envisaged.

  Having arrived from the landing area just too late to join the rest of the 2nd South Staffords in their ill-fated attack up the Utrechtsestraat, Major Philip Wright and C Company had spent the morning waiting for orders near the Rhine Pavilion. At some point Major Wright went forward to contact Colonel McCardie, leaving Captain John Dickens in charge. Wright then went missing and had actually been killed, possibly when Battalion HQ was overrun.40 As the ranking officer Major Cain therefore assumed command of C Company, the other elements of the South Staffords which had come in with the second lift and around a hundred survivors from the fight at the Municipal Museum who had rallied in the vicinity. Some of the latter had been gathered up near the junction of the Utrechtseweg and Onderlangs by Regimental Sergeant Major Slater. At least one, a Private Millward, had been captured while undergoing treatment in the St Elizabeth Hospital: ‘I had been hit in the arm, and was getting it seen to, when a German appeared and took us prisoner. The German for some reason left us for a minute, so I jumped out of the window and headed back the way we had come.’41 Major Cain may also have been responsible for a radio request to Division HQ to return the South Staffords’ anti-tank guns, which had been sequestered en route from the landing area the previous evening.42 Half of the survivors were placed under Captain Ralph Schwartz, the Battalion Adjutant, and the remainder under Company Sergeant Major William Robinson from B Company. This gave Cain a force roughly equivalent to five rifle platoons, augmented with Lieutenant James MacDonnell’s No.1 MMG Platoon which had come in with C Company on the second lift. The War Diary account suggests that Colonel Lea may have assigned the mission of seizing Den Brink before Major Cain arrived, although another source refers to Cain attending an O Group with Lea.43

  Whoever was initially responsible, Major Cain began by despatching Lieutenant John Badger’s 18 Platoon to secure a firm base at the north-west corner of the Arnhem prison compound, at the eastern foot of the high ground. He then deployed the MMG platoon with 18 Platoon to provide cover before leading the rest of his force straight up the wooded slope. The feature appears to have been largely evacuated by SS Panzer Pionier Abteilung 9, given that the only opposition encountered was machine-gun fire from the southern end of the feature, which was quickly and effectively suppressed by Lieutenant MacDonnell’s Vickers guns. Den Brink was thus secured, probably before 13:30, and the glider soldiers set about digging in. The amount of tree roots made it slow-going and most were still above ground when the Germans retaliated with an intense ten-minute mortar bombardment, the effect of which was exacerbated by bombs exploding in the branches overhead. The mortaring caused a number of casualties and the dead included Lieutenant Badger, who had just arrived with his platoon from the firm base by the prison when the bombardment commenced.44

  Colonel Lea had been organising his move across the railway, closing the 11th Battalion up along the line of the Zuidelijke Parallelweg, which, as its name suggests, ran along the edge of the railway cutting. In addition what was described as a ‘weak company’ in the South Staffords’ War Diary was deployed on the northern edge of Den Brink after the mortar bombardment, passing across Major Cain’s front to his left flank.45 Colonel Lea also summoned his B Company up to the Battalion RV from its crossroad covering position, arriving in person via Jeep at around 13:30 and ordering Major Blacklidge to move north up the Oranjestraat to the RV; Lieutenant James Blackwood recalled seeing Lea holding an O Group as he arrived at the Battalion RV with 6 Platoon.46

  Back at the Utrechtseweg, Kampfgruppe Möller pushed west as far as the St Elizabeth Hospital before pausing. The hiatus is usually explained as a measure to permit the Germans to regroup and clear their gains properly, as described by Sergeant James Drew: ‘A vehicle came up and down the street with a loud hailer shouting “Come out, you South Staffords, with your hands up. You are surrounded, and there is no way out.” We stayed in the cellar…Eventually the cellar door was kicked open, and a German threw an object on the cellar floor…After several minutes I looked and saw that it was a house brick. He was, indeed, the finest German that I had never met. We were then taken prisoner of wa
r.’47 However, the evidence suggests the primary reason for the pause was to ascertain the best route to continue the advance, and at least one StuG probed down the Utrechtseweg as far as the anti-tank screen covering the firm base just west of the Utrechtseweg‒Onderlangs junction. The appearance of the German vehicle saw Gunner Eric Milner from C Troop, 1st Airlanding Anti-tank Battery tasked to evacuate an abandoned 6-Pounder gun still hitched to a Jeep at the front of the St Elizabeth Hospital: ‘I had to turn the Jeep round first, as it was facing the tank, which was still some distance away. Just as I turned, the tank saw me and fired, but the shells were going over my head. I looked around and saw…the shell bounce off a bump in the road…There was one more fright for me; as I drove to safety, I ran over power cables in the road with blue flashes everywhere.’48