Arnhem

by William F Buckingham

  Colonel Payton-Reid had been ordered to extend the line eastward to just short of the Stationsweg and chose to centre his position on the Hotel Dreyeroord, which his men christened the White House. C Company was given responsibility for the west and part of the north and southern sectors, D Company the east side and the rest of the north, and the depleted B Company contingent was allotted the remainder of the southern sector. The Battalion’s MMG Sections deployed facing the direction of immediate threat toward the railway, the anti-tank guns were deployed to cover the approaches of all four quadrants and the 3-inch mortars adjacent to the White House with the RAP inside. The perimeter was established by 01:00 despite the darkness and patrols were then despatched to check the railway embankment and houses in the immediate vicinity, not least because there was a 400-yard gap in the line between the KOSB perimeter and that of the 4th Parachute Squadron. Stand to was ordered at 04:30 and C Company then despatched CanLoan Lieutenant Martin Kaufman and 11 Platoon with a Vickers Section to mount a standing patrol on the railway, while Lieutenant Joseph Hunter and 13 Platoon from D Company performed a similar function in houses to the east. Colonel Payton-Reid called a ‘co-ordinating conference’ at 06:00 where he reviewed the situation and stressed that the Battalion’s perimeter was to be ‘held inviolate’ and that every opportunity was to be seized for offensive action. Administrative matters were also discussed, and Payton-Reid ‘authorised the issue of rations from the Compo Packs on a one-third basis’.53 The 4th Parachute Squadron RE contingent had spent a relatively peaceful night in their trenches near the Ommershof, although the attached Polish 6-Pounder was withdrawn after daylight without explanation; the removal was presumably due to the presence of the 7th KOSB’s anti-tank element.54

  The German ground assault on the Graaf Van Rechterenweg line began at 08:00 with a company-strength attack on the 4th Parachute Squadron supported by two Sd.Kfz. 250 armoured half-tracks, likely from SS Panzer Aufklärungs Abteilung 9. The attack was beaten off, although one 3 Troop Sapper was shot dead while standing close behind Captain Henry Brown, allegedly by a sniper; the enemy’s attention may have been attracted by Brown’s maroon beret, which he had taken to wearing as a morale booster for his men in lieu of his camouflaged Airborne helmet. The men took a different view and persuaded Brown to cover the beret with his face veil.55 At around 10:00 the German mortar bombardment grew heavier and a self-propelled gun of some kind, possibly a Panzerjäger IV from SS Panzerjäger Abteilung 9, drew up on the Graaf Van Rechterenweg directly in front of 3 Troop and began firing down the road at the 7th KOSB’s positions around the White House: ‘It stopped about 120 yards from us and began firing…We were amazed to realise that we could see the white hot shell flashing past our eyes only a few yards to our front…We opened up with our Bren gun and rifles and Sapper Grantham fired a couple of PIAT bombs at the gun. It eventually stopped firing and withdrew to the north, well screened by the trees.’56 The German bombardment was not to be so easily deflected and one salvo of mortar bombs killed two Sappers and severely wounded Captain Thomas in both legs; he was evacuated to the nearest RAP with three or four other men wounded in the same incident but died around thirty minutes later, shortly after being visited by Captain Brown.57

  On the 7th KOSB frontage the Vickers Section attached to Lieutenant Kaufman’s standing patrol on the railway engaged a large group of the enemy in a wood north of the line at around 09:00. C Company commander Major Gordon Dinwiddie went forward with Lieutenant Alexander Crighton from the KOSB Mortar Group, who brought down effective fire until he was shot and killed, again allegedly by a sniper.58 The Germans then began to outflank the standing patrol’s location, eventually obliging Lieutenant Kaufman to withdraw into the main Battalion perimeter via D Company’s frontage. While this was going on one of the KOSB 6-Pounder anti-tank guns knocked out what was reported as an armoured car but was likely one of the Sd.Kfz. 250 armoured half-tracks involved in the earlier attack on the 4th Parachute Squadron, given that a vehicle of that type was damaged and abandoned on the Graaf Van Rechterenweg.59 Another 6-Pounder under Lieutenant Alexander Hannah was despatched with a Platoon from B Company to cover the Stationsweg just south of the Oosterbeek Hoog crossing and ended up fighting what was described as a Tiger tank ‘towing a flame-throwing apparatus’; as the only Tiger tanks in the area were engaged at the Arnhem road bridge at this time, the vehicle was likely a Flammpanzer B2 (f) from Panzer Kompanie 224. Whatever it was and whoever it belonged to, the vehicle was reportedly knocked out and the crew killed by the courageous efforts of the gun crew and especially a Corporal Watson and a Private McWhirter. Back within the Battalion perimeter it had become apparent that the White House was too exposed for the Battalion RAP and Colonel Payton-Reid therefore ordered it relocated to a more protected house even though the house lacked running water. The transfer appears to have been supervised by Battalion second-in-command Major John Coke and involved repeatedly running the gauntlet of increasingly heavy German mortar, artillery and small-arms fire; Major Coke was wounded in the leg during the move.60

  Things were less active on the lower half of the 1st Border’s frontage along the western face of the Divisional perimeter. B Company was untroubled in its location on the Westerbouwing Heights overlooking the Lower Rhine and the Heveadorp ferry terminal, apart from intermittent mortaring and some small-scale probes against the outpost held by Lieutenant Wellbelove’s 13 Platoon and Sergeant Thomas Watson’s 14 Platoon on the main Company perimeter; given the generally poor standard of fieldcraft exhibited by the German troops encountered by the Reconnaissance Squadron in the area, the contacts may have been accidental. The sound of tracked vehicles was clearly audible to the west and the glider soldiers thus needed little prompting to deepen slit trenches and generally improve their defences.61

  There was nothing accidental about D Company’s contact during the morning, however. The thick woods around the Company’s location on the Van Borsselenweg midway between the Utrechtseweg restricted visibility so much that Company commander Captain William Hodgson decided to despatch Lieutenant Jack Bainbridge and 19 Platoon to establish a combined standing patrol and observation post at a junction on the Van der Molenallee several hundred yards in front of the main Company location. The junction was reached without incident but Lieutenant Bainbridge was unable to signal his safe arrival or relay information, as the two signallers attached to the Platoon were unable to contact Company HQ with their No. 18 set. Perhaps more importantly, the absence of 19 Platoon obliged the remaining three platoons to extend their frontage and a German patrol was able to infiltrate the British perimeter via an area of uncovered dead ground between Lieutenant Alan Green’s 20 Platoon and Lieutenant George Brown’s 22 Platoon; the interlopers were able to shoot up two Jeeps belonging to a 6-Pounder Gun Section and made good their escape before the glider soldiers could react. The two Platoons were obliged to reorganise their positions to prevent a recurrence, fortunately without further interference from the enemy.62

  The relative quiet did not extend to the northern half of the 1st Border’s frontage. At 10:00 a group of German infantry supported by two armoured vehicles, reportedly a tank and a self-propelled gun, were spotted approaching A Company’s location near the Graftombe by Corporal Walter Collings, whose Scout Section from 10 Platoon was deployed covering tracks through the woods; the vehicles were probably from Panzer Kompanie 224. Collings quickly divined the vehicles’ line of approach and set up an ambush with a PIAT, but as the tank emerged into view 10 Platoon’s commander and Platoon Sergeant, Lieutenant Edmund Scrivener and Sergeant John Hunter, emerged around a bend farther down the track; the commander of the lead German vehicle and Sergeant Hunter were both killed in the ensuing exchange of fire.63 According to Collings’ account Sergeant Hunter ‘fell right beside me. The officer lost his mind and was running all over the place, the tank still firing.’64 Lieutenant Scrivener’s account was different: ‘I heard what sounded like a thousand tin cans being rattled. Curious, I stro
lled to the end of an avenue of trees and looked along it. Coming toward me were two Tiger tanks and their supporting infantry. My sergeant and I dashed behind a coal shed just in time. The tank fired a couple of shells into the other end, but it must have been full of coal. Unfortunately my sergeant made a run for it. They shot him down before he had gone five paces.’65 Whichever, the death of the lead vehicle commander appears to have dampened German enthusiasm, as they withdrew rather than pressing forward.

  Corporal Collings was involved in beating off another German attack shortly thereafter:

  We were guarding a path in a different part of the woods when three truck loads of Germans started coming down, we engaged them, then all was quiet, then they felled a couple of trees across the path. I had my binoculars and could see them crawling behind the fallen trees, so I got Jack sighted on the spot from which they had emerged, and every time one came out I’d call to Jack and he would let go with his replacement Bren gun and the Germans soon gave up that idea.66

  10 Platoon also had repeatedly to clear enemy infiltrators from a large house to the front of the Platoon position. Corporal Thomas Edgar led several such expeditions before being shot entering the back door of the house, prompting a Private Beardsall to empty an entire Bren magazine into the building; further investigation yielded a single German body. Corporal Edgar was evacuated to the Battalion RAP but subsequently died from his wounds.67 The Border’s C Company, dug in around the Koude Herberg junction where the Van Borsselenweg ran south from the Utrechtseweg, also came under pressure from elements of SS Unterführerschule ‘Arnheim’. The attack began with intense fire from mortars and a nebelwerfer that interfered with efforts to evacuate the non-ambulatory wounded from the positions occupied by Lieutenant Alan Roberts’ 16 Platoon; these may have included casualties caused by a near miss to one of the attached 6-Pounder guns which killed Private James Wells and wounded Sergeant French and Private Jock McKinley in the head and leg respectively. The bombardment was followed by a ground attack on 16 Platoon supported by one or possibly two tanks, again, likely Flammpanzer B2 (f) tanks from Panzer Kompanie 224. The attack was nullified with the assistance of an unnamed officer from the Royal Engineers, presumably from the 9th Field Company RE dug in on C Company’s left flank, given that the Field Company War Diary refers to enemy tanks being involved in the morning fighting.68 The Germans retaliated by setting fire to the thatched roofs of several houses to the front of Lieutenant Roberts’ position and using the smoke to cover a second assault, which was also driven off. The glider soldiers were unable to prevent a number of Dutch civilians sheltering in the houses being burned to death.69

  The German attacks from the north against the line on the Graaf Van Rechterenweg were the work of Kampfgruppen Bruhn and Krafft, which had closed in on Oosterbeek from the sperrlinie along the Dreijensweg and across LZ L, while the enemy pressing against the 1st Border’s A Company from the west belonged to SS Bataillon Eberwein. As noted, the latter made up the centre of the German front moving in from the west, having been tasked the previous day to clear Wolfheze and advance along the line of the Arnhem‒Ede railway, accompanied by tanks from Panzer Kompanie 224. Although the 1st Border Company was unaware of the fact, the pressure could have been a good deal more acute: Hackett’s 4th Parachute Brigade HQ and the depleted 10th and 156 Parachute Battalions were still at large near Wolfheze, and thus inadvertently distracted a good portion of SS Bataillon Eberwein’s attention from the Divisional perimeter. According to Hackett the Brigade was on the move by 06:15, although this may have referred to the HQ element, given that 156 Parachute Battalion did not report receiving the movement order until forty-five minutes later.70 Hackett’s plan was to follow a wooded track south-west from the Point 232 overnight position to a larger track called the Breedelaan that ran almost due south past the Hotel Bilderberg to the Utrechtseweg, and then move east to the Hotel Hartenstein. The approximately 270-strong 156 Battalion was to take the lead followed by Hackett’s HQ and Brigade Troops with the c. 250-strong 10th Battalion bringing up the rear. Hackett also organised what he dubbed an ‘advance group’ to act as a vanguard made up of men drawn from all units and commanded by Captain Reginald Temple from the Brigade Staff; according to one source the group also included a number of Glider Pilots.71

  Matters went awry virtually from the outset. The advance group came under fire almost immediately on moving off, possibly from a German ambush, and likely before the Brigade column had shaken out properly. Captain Temple was wounded in the right arm in the exchange and Hackett was obliged to despatch a protective screen of HQ personnel commanded by Captain Edmund James to cover the advance group’s withdrawal into the Brigade HQ portion of the column.72 156 Parachute Battalion was then directed to lead the move along another track toward the Breedelaan, moving off at 07:00. Lieutenant-Colonel Des Vœux placed the officerless A Company in the lead followed by Major Michael Page’s HQ Company, Major Geoffrey Powell’s C Company and with badly depleted B Company bringing up the rear, totalling approximately 270 men. The Breedelaan was reached without incident and the column made good progress until some point between 07:15 and 08:00, when it reached a track junction around 300 yards short of the Utrechtseweg and just west of the Hotel Bilderberg.73 A Company was then brought to a halt by intense automatic fire from the houses grouped around the junction. While A Company attempted to fight through, Colonel Des Vœux ordered C Company to perform a right flanking movement around the blockage. Powell’s men reached a position overlooking the Utrechtseweg and shot up a number of halted half-tracks, but were then also stopped approximately 200 yards short of the road by fire from German troops dug in on the opposite side. This caused a number of casualties including the commander of 11 Platoon, Lieutenant William Donaldson, whose death left Powell as C Company’s sole officer. He formed a defensive perimeter and rebuffed two German counter-attacks, but ammunition began to run short and when Powell returned to Battalion HQ in person to obtain a resupply, Colonel Des Vœux ordered him to bring his Company back to the main Battalion location on the Breedelaan. The move appears to have been complete by 10:00.74

  By this point Hackett realised that the scale of opposition ‘was not the odd patrol I had thought but a force moving EAST along axis either WOLFHEZEN – main rd – or HEELSUM main rd, whose left our adv gp must have bumped on first moving off.’ He ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Smyth to deploy the 10th Battalion to cover the right rear of the column while 156 Battalion continued to push along the line of the Breedelaan.75 To complicate matters, Urquhart came up on the Brigade net while all this was going on and ordered Hackett to attend the 08:00 conference at Division HQ, although this at least provided Hackett with the opportunity to inform the Division commander of his situation.76 By 10:00 156 Battalion had secured the track junction in the face of constant fire from German mortars and anti-tank guns, the latter being used against any building captured by the paratroopers, but the Battalion lost over half its strength in the process. C Company was reduced to forty men, HQ Company to thirty, A Company to fifteen and B Company to just six, although Hackett estimated German losses were five times higher.77 In the meantime a series of ‘small exploiting attacks’ led by Brigade Major Bruce Dawson, presumably using Brigade HQ personnel, had identified an opening in the surrounding enemy to the east. Hackett decided to reorient his axis of movement by side-slipping into the gap as far as another track called the Valkenberglaan before striking south again for the Utrechtseweg, and ordered 156 Battalion to hold in place while the 10th Parachute Battalion took the lead. 156 Battalion interestingly characterised its part in the new scheme as covering ‘10 Bn’s withdrawal to the Div perimeter’.78 Colonel Smyth appears to have been rather slower moving off than Hackett had anticipated, reportedly because the 10th Battalion’s ‘starting org was not over strong’. This was perhaps because Smyth was approaching the end of his tether, as shown by a conversation between him, the commander of HQ Company Major Charles Ashworth, and QM Lieutenant Joseph Glover at 0
3:00 that morning; according to Glover, Smyth said ‘Look, I think we’ve had it. I’ve lost my command and I don’t know where we are. I think you’d better get in pairs and decide if you want to stick with me or go it on your own.’ After some discussion the two officers decided to stick with their Battalion commander.79 Once underway the move appears to have proceeded rather too swiftly. Hackett noted: ‘Comms bad and when they did start they pushed on without much regard to the rest of the coln [sic] which lost touch with them and ultimately got divided in two.’80

  The 10th Battalion’s semi-official account puts things rather differently, referring to slow progress due to having to ‘overcome a certain amount of opposition from enemy tanks’ and to receiving a radio message from Hackett just after turning south onto the Valkenberglaan at midday that ordered Smyth to ‘pull the plug’ and speed things up.81 Smyth reacted by ordering his men to fix bayonets and charge, although it is unclear whether the charge was directed southward toward the Utrechtseweg or east toward the Sonnenberg. Whatever the direction, the charge carried the paratroopers clear of the enemy and the woods, although the dead included D Company’s commander, Captain Cedric Horsfall.82 Once within the relative safety of the Division perimeter the much-reduced Battalion formed up and marched up to the Hotel Hartenstein. Their arrival at 13:10 was witnessed by Urquhart: