Arnhem

by William F Buckingham

  Merely carrying the boats, which weighed between 300 and 400 pounds before loading across the 150 yards to the river was no mean feat in itself and the task was complicated by the gradient of the dyke and the soft sand it was constructed from. The crossing ran into its first obstacle before clearing the far side of the dyke, in the shape of a tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire that barred the way to the water’s edge. Captain Kappel and Lieutenant Magellas blew down two supports with Gammon bombs before pushing a section of it flat and the boat parties then had to cover another hundred yards that included a three-foot high ridge and a stretch of thick, ankle-deep mud before reaching the water; Captain Keep’s party simplified the process by allowing their assault boat to slide down the dyke and sliding after it. Loading and launching the vessels then brought its own problems. Captain Kappel had to rescue a Private Legacie from his party from drowning as his assault boat was launched, Captain Keep’s boat grounded briefly on a mudbank and Lieutenant Carmichael’s vessel spun in circles until he provided counter-paddling from the rear to keep it on course.16 Despite all this the first wave was launched successfully and the little armada began to make its bobbing and circling way across the river, fighting the eight-knot current. In an attempt to ease matters for the men paddling his assault boat Major Cook set up a rhythm by chanting ‘Hail Mary Full of Grace’ and Chaplain Kuehl followed his lead with ‘Lord, thy will be done’; on a less ecclesiastical note Captain Keep employed a ‘one-two-three-four’ chant from his stint of competitive rowing at Princeton University.17

  Up until 100 yards of so out the crossing had only come under random small-arms fire but at that point the wind began to open gaps in the smokescreen on the north bank, possibly made more likely by the launch taking longer than planned; the Germans opened fire on the hapless assault boats with every weapon they could bring to bear. Private First Class Everett S. Trefetheren likened the result to a ‘school of mackerel on the feed’.18 The Engineer steering Captain Burriss’ assault boat was hit in the wrist and then decapitated by a 20mm round, as was the man alongside the frantically paddling Chaplain Kuehl. The result of hits from larger-calibre rounds was devastating. Sergeant Albert A. Tarbell had just made eye contact with Private Louis Holt in a nearby vessel when Holt’s boat was obliterated by a direct hit. Lieutenant Magellas lost half his platoon to another mortar bomb.19 The floors of the surviving assault boats were soon carpeted with dead or wounded paratroopers slumped in several inches of water and blood, while those still physically capable paddled frantically with oars, rifle butts, helmets or their bare hands. It took between fifteen and twenty-five minutes for the assault boats to reach the north bank, and then up to 500 hundred yards downstream of their intended landing point owing to the current. A number of boats had to be abandoned as they were too badly damaged for reuse; according Captain Kappel only eight were in a fit state to return to the south bank.20

  Not everyone paddled all the way. Captain Kappel jumped overboard into the shallow water and pushed his assault boat, which by now only contained two or three unwounded men, for the last thirty yards. Lieutenant Ernest Patrick Murphy’s vessel was swamped by a near miss a similar distance out. All aboard made it to the shore including Private Joseph Jedlicka, a non-swimmer who landed upright on the riverbed and stolidly walked up the slope to safety still carrying his slung BAR and a can of ammunition in each hand.21

  On reaching the north bank, the first to make landfall overran a number of waterside German positions, killing around fifty.22 They then went to ground where they could to shelter from the incessant German crossfire, some in the lee of a convenient low embankment by the water’s edge; others, including Captain Kappel, raced several hundred yards up the beach before finding shelter. Once under some semblance of cover the paratroopers paused to gather breath and wits and, as the chaos of the crossing had swept away formal unit organisation, gravitated to the nearest officer or NCO while clearing their weapons of river mud, securing equipment and distributing ammunition in preparation for the next move. The exceptions to this were Captain Hyman D. Shapiro, the 3rd Battalion’s Assistant Medical Officer and Chaplain Kuehl, who busied themselves aiding the wounded along the water’s edge, administering first aid and morphine and either putting into or leaving aboard the most serious cases on the assault boats moving back across the Waal; Chaplain Kuehl was wounded himself by mortar bomb fragments as he went about his work. The able-bodied plus a number of wounded then charged across the 800 yards to the dyke, intent on exacting retribution for what they had suffered during the crossing, under the continuing enfilade fire from the German automatic weapons sited in Fort Beneden Lent and the railway bridge; the automatic weapons behind the dyke were unable to depress sufficiently to hit the attackers as they drew closer. The paratroopers overran a number of outposts and despatched those within with bayonets and after a brief pause at its base, swarmed onto the dyke killing every German they found before pushing on to clear the network of positions behind the dyke, again with grenades and bayonets. The ruthless nature of the fight was well illustrated by a comment by Captain Kappel when subsequently chided by other 3rd Battalion officers regarding the small number of prisoners taken by Company H in the action: ‘You captured yours. We shot ours.’23

  By 15:45 the dyke had been secured and Captain Burriss and Company I had established a defensive perimeter to protect the crossing point as ordered and despite having been wounded in the right side during the crossing, Burriss set off with a group of men toward the railway bridge in the wake of Captain Kappel and Company H, who had already moved off eastward. After overrunning a German position dug into an orchard, Company H came under fire from the Fort Beneden Lent and Captain Kappel despatched Lieutenant Magellas’ platoon to deal with it. Approaching from the north, Magellas laid suppressive fire on the fort’s parapet and despatched Sergeant Leroy Richmond across the moat to investigate; when Richmond reported there was a drawbridge on the south side, Magellas led a charge across it, cleared the parapet killing around a dozen of the garrison, destroyed the 20mm guns emplaced there and drove the survivors into the lower reaches of the fort. As he lacked the numbers for a systematic clearing he then withdrew, leaving a .30 machine-gun team posted inside the drawbridge to keep the garrison bottled up and pressed on to rejoin Company H; the machine-gunners were relieved later in the day by the 1st Battalion, which then cleared the fort properly.

  In the meantime Captain Kappel had reached the railway embankment at around 16:00, behind which the survivors from the fight at the dyke were regrouping and an impasse developed after attempts by the paratroopers to penetrate through underpasses beneath the line and charging over the top were rebuffed. Lieutenant Richard LaRiviere from Company I had reached the north end of the railway bridge via some ditches by the riverbank at around 17:00 and secured it after a brief fight. He was then joined by a succession of individuals and groups of paratroopers as they gravitated south in an attempt to bypass the block on the railway embankment, including Captain Kappel and the bulk of Company H, Captain Burriss and his party, and Major Cook, who had become separated from most of his Battalion Command Group. After Kappel’s men had captured a fortified position built into the bridge structure partway across, taking Company H’s first prisoners of the day in the process, Major Cook reported the capture of the 3rd Battalion’s primary objective to Colonel Tucker by radio at 17:40 and requested tanks be despatched to the north bank immediately.24

  While Colonel Tucker’s 504th Regiment was carrying out its epic river crossing, Lieutenant-Colonel Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment was continuing a watching brief along the south side of the Keizer Lodewijkplein traffic circle just south of the Nijmegen road bridge, although in some instances this brief was interpreted somewhat aggressively. Lieutenant James J. Coyle from Company E took a party of men including Corporal Thomas Burke, Corporal Earl Boling and Private John L. Gill to stalk a dual-purpose 88mm gun located in a street off the Keizer Lodewijkplein tha
t had shelled the houses occupied by Coyle and his men during the previous day’s fighting. Moving cautiously into an attic that overlooked the gun, the paratroopers drove the crew off the gun with rifle fire, killing one, and prompting the rest to abandon the gun and withdraw into the Hunnerpark. Thereafter matters went awry. Sergeant Ben Popilsky was shot dead while trying to join the group, Private Gill was badly wounded by Germans occupying an adjacent house and Corporal Burke was killed in an attempt to drag him to safety; in the end Lieutenant Coyle was obliged to blow out the back wall of the German-occupied house with a Bazooka before his party was able to withdraw to the main Company E position. The episode cost Coyle’s platoon three dead and one wounded and it is unclear if the Germans re-manned the 88mm gun.25 On the left of Colonel Vandervoort’s position Lieutenant-Colonel Goulbourn’s morning reorientation of the 1st Grenadier Guards had been successfully accomplished and in the early afternoon of 20 September he made some last-minute adjustments in readiness for the attack at 15:30. As the Grenadier’s attack frontage was narrow and further constricted by rubble-filled streets, Goulbourn reduced his attack to a two-company affair, dividing his centre No. 2 Company up between his other two. On the left Captain the Hon. Vicary Gibbs’ King’s Company was tasked to secure the Valkhofpark and specifically the mound topped by the ruins of Nijmegen’s ancient citadel, which, riven with tunnels, was the highest point in the city. On the right Major Harry Stanley’s No. 4 Company was to secure a cluster of buildings on the boundary between the Valkhofpark and the Hunnerpark that included the Haus Robert Janssen, which Hauptsturmführer Karl-Heinz Euling had appropriated as his Kampfgruppe HQ. Lieutenant-Colonel Vandervoort’s paratroopers were to attack the portion of the Hunnerpark west of the Arnhemscheweg, Lieutenant James E. Smith’s Company E on the right assaulting directly across the Keizer Lodewijkplein into the corner of the park from the south while on the left Robert H. Rosen and Company F went in from the north-west across the Sint Jorisstraat; the remainder of 2nd Battalion was to provide supporting fire from the rooftops opposite the Hunnerpark.26

  The 1st Grenadier Guards attack appears to have begun on schedule at 15:30 and ran into trouble almost immediately. The commander of the King’s Company, Captain The Hon. Vicary Gibbs, was killed in the opening minutes of the attack and a newly arrived Lieutenant M. Dawson was obliged to take over.27 The boundary of the Valkhofpark was blocked by barbed wire covered by machine-guns but the Guardsmen cut through an unguarded section of wire and passed two platoons through the gap, who penetrated to within fifteen yards of the mound before being spotted. A vicious ninety-minute close-quarter fight ensued with elements of SS Panzer Pionier Bataillon 10 before most of the SS were driven off the mound, but heavy German fire then prevented the Guards from pushing on to the road bridge, which was now in plain sight. Major Stanley’s No. 4 Company was stopped by intense automatic fire and lost four of its supporting Shermans within minutes of leaving the start line and, after consultation with Lieutenant-Colonel Goulbourn, reoriented its axis of attack slightly to the right. The renewed effort by No. 4 Company then broke through into the Valkhofpark close to the Keizer Lodewijkplein and at the same time unhinged the right flank of the SS Panzergrenadiers in the Hunnerpark facing Company F.28 Matters appear to have gone awry initially on the US attack frontage, as according to one source Captain Robert H. Rosen launched Company F’s attack on the left of the Keizer Lodewijkplein prematurely, without permission from Lieutenant-Colonel Vandervoort or tank support, likely at around 15:00 given the subsequent sequence of events. Captain Rosen moved his men into the front and backyards around a street leading to the Hunnerpark, likely the Gerard Noodstraat, and then led a charge across the Sint Jorisstraat in person accompanied by the twenty or so men who heard him give the order. The attackers reached the edge of the Hunnerpark before being stopped by a wall of German defensive fire and the survivors, many of them wounded, fell back the way they had come. The dead included Captain Rosen who expired after being wounded in the face; he was seen running to the rear clutching his wound by Sergeant Spencer Wurst. Command of Company F was assumed by the senior platoon commander, Lieutenant Joseph Holcomb.29

  The need for Company F to regroup following the premature attack may have delayed Lieutenant-Colonel Vandervoort launching his full assault on the Hunnerpark; this would explain the 16:40 start time cited in the US official history, and also the strength of the initial German reaction to the attack on the Valkhofpark, if the 1st Grenadier Guards went in as originally scheduled at 15:30.30 On the right, Lieutenant Smith led Company E’s 1st Platoon in a charge straight across the Keizer Lodewijkplein covered by fire from 2nd Platoon. The rush carried the paratroopers into the south-east corner of the Hunnerpark where they set about clearing the German trenches with grenades and bayonets. On the left, Company F left the shelter of the buildings and formed an extended line along the line of the Sint Jorisstraat and once all the paratroopers were in the open the Germans in the Hunnerpark opened fire with every weapon they could muster at ranges between twenty-five and 150 yards. The Company lost Lieutenant Holcomb killed and at least two platoon commanders severely wounded in a matter of minutes: Holcomb was shot through the head, possibly by a sniper, Lieutenant Bill Savell was shot through both arms and 1st Lieutenant John Dodd was so severely wounded in the body by a 20mm round that his platoon medic administered an overdose of morphine to ease his suffering. Despite this, F Company succeeded in penetrating into the southern edge of the park and set about clearing the trenches and gun positions in a flurry of merciless close-quarter fights. Their progress may have been eased by the appearance of the Grenadier Guards No. 4 Company, and more especially its supporting Sherman tanks, on the paratrooper’s left flank, following Major Stanley’s renewed push from the west.31 The formal link-up of the Grenadier Guards No. 4 Company and Vandervoort’s Company F occurred on the riverside embankment just west of the road bridge ramp, in the gathering dusk at around 18:30.32 Organised German resistance in the area had ceased at some point before this, when Hauptsturmführer Euling’s HQ in the Haus Robert Janssen at the south-eastern corner of the Valkhofpark was attacked by a platoon from No. 4 Company. The platoon was commanded by Lieutenant Adriaan Slob, a Dutch national who had escaped to Britain earlier in the war. After an inconclusive fight that included tanks firing point-blank into the building, Lieutenant Slob decided to burn the building down with phosphorous grenades rather than engage in a bloody room-to-room fight, after which the HQ was ignored.33 Ironically, the events at the south end of the Nijmegen road bridge mirrored those twelve miles or so to the north, where the gallant defenders of the Arnhem road bridge by Lieutenant-Colonel Frost’s force were coming to a similar conclusion.

  There remained the task of physically taking the Nijmegen bridges. Captain Kappel and Company H from the 3rd Battalion 504th Parachute Infantry had secured the north end of the railway bridge by 17:40, and shortly thereafter Captain Neville’s West Force renewed its push for the south end of the railway bridge. Kampfgruppe Henke appears to have been unaware of the US presence on the north bank of the River Waal and the renewed attack prompted around 300 men to fall back across the railway bridge, only to be faced by Captain Kappel’s men, who had deployed two captured machine-guns and two Browning Automatic Rifle teams to fire down the length of the bridge. The guns engaged the approaching mob of Germans as they passed the fort built into the bridge structure, from which Captain Kappel thickened the fire with Gammon bombs, driving the Germans back into the middle of the span. Kappel then despatched a German prisoner to persuade them to surrender and when he was shot by SS among the throng, the guns resumed their fire, sweeping systematically back and forth across the width of the bridge, prompting a number of desperate men to jump into the River Waal; 267 bodies were later counted on the bridge.34 In the meantime, Captain Burriss, Lieutenant LaRiviere and a small party had pressed east along the river and after a two-hour journey that involved tackling a houseful of Germans with a Gammon bomb, shooting up a German ca
r full of Dutch currency, clearing two 88mm flak emplacements and taking a petrified lone sentry prisoner, arrived at the deserted north end of the road bridge at 19:00. Burriss immediately despatched Lieutenant LaRiviere onto the bridge with Private James Musa and another paratrooper to search for demolition charges, despite small groups of Germans making their way across the bridge from the clearly audible fight at the south end and fire from snipers ensconced high in the bridge structure. They were only partway across the span when a tank began to cross from the south end and assuming it was German, LaRiviere and his men hurriedly rejoined Burriss and the main group and prepared to engage the approaching vehicle with Gammon bombs, the only anti-armour weapon the little band had to hand.35

  At the south end of the road bridge a Troop of Shermans commanded by Sergeant Peter Robinson had been held in readiness for a dash across the bridge once Kampfgruppe Euling’s grip had been loosened. A first attempt at 18:00, prompted by Major Cook’s 17:40 signal that did not make clear he was referring to the railway bridge, was driven back into cover by intense anti-tank fire, including shots from an 88mm dual purpose gun near the north end of the bridge.36 The attempt was reportedly ordered by the commander of the 2nd Grenadier Guards, Lieutenant-Colonel Rodney Moore, which suggests that Sergeant Robinson’s Troop was outwith the control of Lieutenant-Colonel Goulbourn and under the direct command of 5th Guards Armoured Brigade HQ or higher. In addition, Goulbourn had left that HQ the previous night under the impression that the assault crossing over the River Waal had been cancelled until a future date. The evidence further suggests that Major Cook’s signal was the first intimation that Goulbourn and by extension Vandervoort had that theirs was not the sole effort and that the assault crossing had actually been carried while their renewed push on the road bridge was underway. Consequently, ‘what has since been characterized as a finely synchronized operation was…the coincidental convergence of two separate attacks…with the same objective’.37