Another gun sited on the road was not so lucky, as witnessed by a signaller from the Airlanding Light Regiment: ‘I saw to my right the front end of a tank…and I was drawn into a general rush down towards an anti-tank gun sited in front of some park railings…The gun No.1 was yelling to people to get out of his line of fire, but too late; the tank got in first, and I was almost knocked over by the blast that left the gun crew spread-eagled.’49 Gunner Len Clarke’s gun from E Troop, 2nd Airlanding Anti-tank Battery, which was deployed in a front garden facing up the Utrechtseweg, fired on a StuG, likely the same vehicle, after a brief argument between Clarke and his Troop commander Lieutenant Robert Glover about who was going to lay the gun; Glover won the argument by dint of his rank and reportedly scored three hits before ordering the gun to redeploy.50 The assault gun may therefore have been at least damaged, given that subsequent reports suggest Kampfgruppe Möller was subsequently accompanied by two rather than three vehicles.51
It was thus clear that further advance westward along the Utrechtseweg would involve tackling a rather more potent foe, but Hauptsturmführer Möller had located another line of attack along the edge of the railway cutting behind the St Elizabeth Hospital, which would bypass the anti-tank screen; German activity on this axis may have prompted the midday warning to the 11th Parachute Battalion that saw B Company deployed to the junction of the Alexanderstraat and the Oranjestraat.52 Whether or not, at some point around 13:30 the Germans commenced a heavy, accurate and prolonged mortar bombardment of Den Brink and, more importantly, on the 11th Battalion’s forming-up position, which caused numerous casualties. Caught in the open the paratroopers were obliged to take cover wherever they could and it was at this point, with the paratroopers at their most disorganised and vulnerable, that Kampfgruppe Möller attacked along the Zuidelijke Parallelweg. Colonel Lea’s men may have been able to counter an infantry assault but they had no effective counter to the assault guns as the Battalion’s attachment from the 2nd Airlanding Anti-tank Battery was still located down on the Utrechtseweg, although one report refers to Captain Albert Taylor from the 2nd Airlanding Light Battery RA bringing a commandeered 6-Pounder gun into action in the 11th Parachute Battalion area and scoring hits on two separate German vehicles.53 The 11th Parachute Battalion War Diary refers to an order to withdraw to Oosterbeek and to B Company setting up a covering position around a crossroads on the line of withdrawal, but it is unclear where any such order came from, given that Lieutenant-Colonel Lea was wounded and captured in the action; the rearguard was credited with holding back the German advance with the aid of an attached 17-Pounder gun, which reportedly knocked out one of a pair of German tanks.54 The evidence therefore suggests that the 11th Parachute Battalion was simply overwhelmed and destroyed in place and that the War Diary was understandably attempting to put the best face on it. Whether or not, only around 150 men managed to break away toward Oosterbeek, in small groups or on their own initiative, trailed by B Company.55
Up on Den Brink Major Cain noted the mortar fire falling on the 11th Parachute Battalion and became aware of that unit’s collapse when parties of paratroopers began falling back through his lines. The tide began with an understrength company that had passed across Cain’s front earlier and carried some of the 2nd South Staffords with them in the confusion. The fleeing paratroopers were closely followed by Kampfgruppe Möller’s attached StuGs, which began to advance up the wooded slope from two points on the east side of the feature.56 Once again the South Staffords were essentially helpless in the face of the armoured vehicles, for there were no PIATs to hand and the request for the return of the Battalion’s organic Anti-tank Group had gone unanswered. Ironically, the commander of the 2nd South Staffords’ Support Company, Major John Buchanan, went forward from Division HQ after a frustrating night ‘twiddling his thumbs’ to assess the situation for himself. He arrived just in time to help impose some order on the retreat and was joined shortly thereafter by one of his anti-tank platoons, possibly that commanded by Captain Geoffrey Woodward, and Lieutenant Alexander Harvie’s No.2 MMG Platoon. Faced with the imminent destruction of the remainder of his Battalion, Major Cain had little option but to abandon Den Brink and retire south-west before the German advance. The decision was not taken lightly as Major Cain later recalled: ‘It would have been a sheer waste of life to remain there. I had no orders to retire, but I remembered what had happened at the monastery. I felt extremely dejected. I knew that our particular effort to get through to the bridge was a failure and that we had been thrown out of the town.’57 The cost of acting as a pivot for the 11th Parachute Battalion’s thwarted attack had been high; according to Cain, his combined force of C Company and two composite platoons had been reduced to between thirty-five and forty men by the time he ordered the withdrawal.58
By this time Kampfgruppe Harder was also pressing in along the Utrechtseweg and the prospect of being trapped between the two German units prompted a general withdrawal by the British elements east of the Oosterbeek Laag railway spur, although some men had fallen back from the earlier fighting at the Municipal Museum. At least four men from the 2nd South Staffords got as far as Oosterbeek old village, two of them via a hijacked civilian bicycle, where they were taken over by a gun detachment from the 2nd Airlanding Anti-tank Battery dug in by the Oosterbeek Old Church. Another group of eight passed all the way through the Division area to Westerbouwing, where they were co-opted by the 1st Border.59 The beginnings of the general retreat were witnessed by Lieutenant-Colonel Thompson, commander of the 1st Airlanding Light Regiment RA, when two Jeeps careered past his attempts to flag them down on the lower Benedendorpsweg road near his 3 Battery positions by the Oosterbeek Old Church; ironically, Thompson was surveying the area with an eye to moving his entire Regiment into the 3 Battery location as their existing position near the Hotel Bilderberg was dangerously close to the western edge of the Division perimeter.60 He therefore ordered the road blocked with two Jeeps and instructed his officers to prevent any further retreat past the Church, using force if necessary.61 Back to the east Major Buchanan assumed command of a leaderless group of around sixty South Staffords on the Klingelbeekseweg, which grew to around 300 in short order and included paratroopers from the 1st, 3rd and 11th Parachute Battalions. The numbers swelled yet further when Buchanan led his party west as many of the South Staffords including Major Cain had used the bridge over the Oosterbeek Laag underpass as a rally point after falling back from Den Brink; it is unclear if this was by chance or design.62
Colonel Thompson had by now been alerted to the full magnitude of the retreat by a radio message from a forward observer attached to one of the withdrawing units. Alarmed by the prospect of his guns being left on the front line with no protection, he went forward in a Jeep to investigate, accompanied by Major Robert Croot from the Glider Pilot Regiment’s G Squadron, and the pair met Buchanan and Cain’s combined party on the Benedendorpsweg around 500 yards west of the Oosterbeek Laag underpass.63 After a hurried conference Thompson placed Buchanan in charge of the parachute unit survivors and ordered him to establish of a defensive perimeter around the nearby junction with the Acacialaan. The 3rd Parachute Battalion contingent, commanded by the irascible Captain Dorrien-Smith, occupied the centre of the line on the junction, with Lieutenant John Williams and the 1st Parachute Battalion to the south and Major Peter Milo and the 11th Parachute Battalion to the north around a crossroad a hundred yards or so up the Acacialaan. Major Robert Cain and the 2nd South Staffords occupied houses just west of the junction, overlooking the Rosander Polder stretching away toward the Lower Rhine and the destroyed railway bridge. The various contingents were in their assigned locations by 14:30.64 Colonel Thompson then departed for Oosterbeek proper, where he arranged for food and ammunition to be despatched to what the 2nd South Staffords dubbed the Station Oosterbeek blocking position, and visited the 1st Airlanding Brigade’s HQ in an effort to secure reinforcements and particularly additional officers. Brigadier Hicks assured Thompson he would
assign Major Richard Lonsdale, the 11th Battalion’s second-in-command who had been wounded in the hand during the fly-in, and Major John Simonds, commanding the South Staffords’ HQ Company, who had spent the night in the Division HQ area.65 Lonsdale and Simonds do not appear to have been sent out until the following morning, but in the immediate term Hicks was also presumably responsible for despatching Major James Dale and his Glider Pilots from C Squadron to establish an outpost line along the Oosterbeek Laag railway spur at around 15:30; the Glider Pilots had been providing security for the Airlanding HQ since 09:00 that day.66
Most of the retreat was channelled along the Benedendorpsweg toward Oosterbeek village but some retired west along the Utrechtseweg including men from the 2nd South Staffords, the 11th Parachute Battalion and Lieutenant Glover’s E Troop from the 2nd Airlanding Anti-tank Battery. The latter group paused at the crossroads with the Stationsweg running north to the Oosterbeek Hoog railway crossing and Pietersbergseweg running south to the Hotel Tafelberg. The latter, the Hotel Schoonoord and the Hotel Vreewijk on opposite sides of the crossroads were occupied by 181 Airlanding Field Ambulance and 133 Parachute Field Ambulance as a Divisional MDS, while Division HQ in the Hotel Hartenstein lay only 500 yards further west along the Utrechtseweg. At this point the small party thus appears to have been all that stood between the German units in the western outskirts of Arnhem and the heart of the 1st Airborne Division, temporarily reinforced by Lieutenant Donald Edwards’ 17 Platoon from the 2nd South Staffords’ C Company, which had spent the night near Division HQ.67 E Troop’s presence rapidly proved fortuitous; Lieutenant Glover was hastily approached by one of the South Staffords deployed further up the Stationsweg who announced that there were ‘some bloody Tiger tanks coming’. Glover and reluctant volunteer Gunner Clarke quickly prepared a Jeep to investigate but before the 6-Pounder could be hitched up a ‘small tank’ nosed out of a side road 250 yards up the Stationsweg; it withdrew after Clarke reportedly scored a direct hit but another appeared shortly thereafter:
We were going to move the gun…but had only manhandled it halfway across the road outside the Schoonoord Hotel when I saw a tank …appearing over the top of a small rise…I shouted ‘Turn the gun, drop the trail and get out of the way.’…I fired three shots at the tank and hit it…Then another came up to pass it, and I hit that as it was passing with another three shots and stopped that. Every time I fired, the gun moved back about fifteen feet because the spade end of the trail wasn’t dug in; we were only on the cobbled street.68
It is unclear what type of vehicles these were. One source suggests that they had infiltrated west from Den Brink but this was unlikely given Sturmgeschütze Brigade 280 does not appear to have lost its first vehicle until the following day. They may therefore have been the armoured vehicles fired on at the south end of the Dreijenseweg near the Oosterbeek Hoog station by 156 Parachute Battalion’s B Company earlier in the day.69 Wherever the vehicles came from, Gunner Clarke’s efforts had the desired effect and there was no further German activity from that quarter.
There was therefore little to stop a determined German thrust into Oosterbeek in the wake of the British retreat from the outskirts of Arnhem, but fortunately for the 1st Airborne Division their opponents had problems of their own. The ad hoc German units had also been moving and fighting virtually non-stop for up to forty-eight hours and more importantly, they also had the task of clearing their newly occupied territory ‒ not all the Airborne troops succeeded in joining the general withdrawal to Oosterbeek, and not all of them gave up without a fight. Private Fred Morton from the 3rd Parachute Battalion’s MMG Platoon was with seven men under a corporal who ambushed an estimated company of German troops and what was reported as a Tiger tank that passed the pair of barricaded terrace houses they occupied, likely on the Klingelbeekseweg. The initial burst of fire killed seven or eight German infantry, but the paratrooper’s single Gammon bomb missed what was probably a StuG and intense machine-gun fire from the vehicle drove them upstairs. An hour-long stand-off then ensued, during which two of the defenders were killed making a break for the Lower Rhine via the back door and three more were seriously wounded, one in the stomach. Morton and his comrades were then persuaded to surrender by the German vehicle commander:
He told us we had fought well and that we would be treated well…We came out of the front door but had to step over two Germans we had killed. Their mates didn’t take that too kindly. The man ahead of me was hit across the head with a rifle butt, and I got it across the arm. I think it was the tank officer who stopped that. We asked if we could go back for our wounded, but they said they would send their own men in for them.70
The Germans were also faced with the problem of rounding up, guarding and moving up to 1,700 prisoners, some of them wounded. Not all were especially cowed either, as Corporal Arthur Hatcher, a member of 16 Parachute Field Ambulance captured at the St Elizabeth Hospital, recalled: ‘They herded us all into a corridor but then they had to wait for a lull outside before they could move us out. We were all sat down…with guards standing over us, and somebody started singing “There’ll Always Be an England”, and everyone joined in. We were still full of confidence and thought we would be relieved any minute and we would be top dog again. The Germans didn’t like it, but they didn’t stop us.’71
With the Germans fully engaged east of the Oosterbeek Laag railway spur, the remnants of the 1st Parachute Brigade were left in relative peace to lick their wounds and reorganise. The hiatus was a welcome respite for the paratroopers and glider soldiers had been moving and fighting virtually non-stop for between twenty-four and forty-eight hours, and the resupply of food and ammunition organised by Colonel Thompson was equally welcome. Despite the piecemeal nature of the retreat discipline remained firm and the return to order after the confusion and isolation of battle also appears to have been well received. An unnamed NCO from the 11th Parachute Battalion said to Thompson, ‘Thank God we’ve got some orders at last; now we’ll be alright.’72
Men continued to trickle into the defensive perimeter on the Benedendorpsweg junction singly or in small groups as the afternoon wore on into evening, some bringing vehicles and equipment. Sergeant Norman Howes and some men from the South Staffords’ A Company came upon two SS with a captured jeep, for instance, ‘complete with a Vickers machine gun and a loaded trailer…We took possession of this valuable item and, on arrival, handed it over to Major Buchanan.’73 By the late evening the position was occupied by around 400 men, 116 to 120 from the 1st Parachute Battalion, forty to forty-six and 150 from the 3rd and 11th Parachute Battalions respectively, and between eighty and a hundred from the 2nd South Staffords.74 Another party of around fifty South Staffords was despatched to Oosterbeek Old Church to provide security for Colonel Thompson’s guns; the latter’s Regimental HQ and 1 and 2 Batteries arrived in the area of the Oosterbeek Old Church at 18:30 in a hasty move prompted by German infiltration into their former location near the Hotel Bilderberg.75 Support was provided by the 2nd South Staffords’ MMG and 6-Pounder Platoons which had come up with Major Buchanan, augmented with an unknown number of 6-Pounders and a single 17-Pounder from the parachute unit attachments. However, the Germans appear to have been aware of the new British position and it was not left entirely unmolested. At approximately 14:30 the area was ‘heavily stonked’ by mortars and nebelwerfer rockets, and at 18:00 artillery fire demolished two of the five houses occupied by the 11th Parachute Battalion’s B Company, killing several men.76 The fire was not all one way; Major Cain scattered German troops moving around the train abandoned near the demolished railway bridge using one of his attached Vickers guns.77
While the 1st Parachute Brigade’s attempt to push through to the Arnhem road bridge was coming to an end east of Oosterbeek, the process was being repeated in the woods north of the town. There the 4th Parachute Brigade was attempting to bypass the impasse along the riverside route by pushing into Arnhem from the north-west, with 156 Parachute Battalion tasked to secure
the Koepel ridge overlooking the city while the 10th Parachute Battalion secured its left flank on the line of the Amsterdamseweg. By midday 156 Parachute Battalion’s effort to secure the intermediate Lichtenbeek feature had been stopped along the line of the Dreijenseweg running north from the Oosterbeek Hoog railway station. On the left Major John Waddy’s B Company had been brought up short by murderous crossfire from newly arrived light flak vehicles that reduced the Company strength to thirty; the casualties included Major Waddy, who was wounded in the groin. The initial attack, by Major John Pott’s A Company on the right, had reached the Dreijenseweg and cleared a number of German positions astride it before degenerating into a game of cat-and-mouse with German half-tracks; ironically the ferocity of Pott’s assault was responsible for the Germans bringing up the flak guns that decimated B Company. In an effort to avoid being pinned down and destroyed, Major Pott led the survivors of his Company north-east and unexpectedly reached his objective on the Lichtenbeek summit without further opposition at around 13:30. At least three paratroopers were so badly wounded they had to be hidden in the undergrowth for recovery later; one of these men, Sergeant George Sheldrake, recalled Pott apologising and saying a prayer over them before moving on.78 The Germans soon became aware of the tiny enclave in their rear but Major Pott led a counter-charge that rebuffed the first German attempt to dislodge them. This reduced the British able-bodied strength to six, which proved too few to carry out another counter-charge around thirty minutes later. Pott was hit in the right hand and left thigh, fracturing his femur, in the attempt. The Germans then overran the British position and marched away the British walking wounded, leaving Pott with assurances he would be collected later. This did not happen and after being tended by a small party including his batman, whom he then ordered to make their way to safety, Major Pott spent eighteen hours alone on the ridge before being discovered and carried to safety by Dutch civilians.79
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