Arnhem
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A second attempt to push across the road bridge was launched at 18:30 and Sergeant Robinson led his Troop, accompanied by a scout car carrying Lieutenant Anthony Jones from 14th Field Company RE, across the Keizer Lodewijkplein and up the Arnhemscheweg onto the bridge while the fight for the Hunnerpark was still in full swing. The number of tanks that reached and crossed the bridge is unclear, with one source claiming two were knocked out while accessing the bridge ramp while others refer to all four tanks crossing safely and to Sergeant Robinson changing vehicles en route as a non-penetrating hit had knocked out his radio.38 However many tanks there were, Robinson’s gunner knocked out an 88mm gun emplaced just off the north end of the bridge in an initial exchange of fire on entering the bridge. After clattering the length of it, shrugging off fire from German troops ensconced in the bridge superstructure and jinking through concrete barriers on the carriageway, he dealt with at least one more anti-tank gun ‒ possibly a StuG ‒ and a number of German infantry near the north ramp before drawing up to where Captain Burriss and his party were deployed in ditches on either side of the Arnhem‒Nijmegen road. As the tank crewmen had no idea there were friendly troops in the vicinity they almost shot them up as well, before recognising their distinctive M1 helmets. The understandably relieved paratroopers swarmed over the Shermans in greeting and Captain Burriss joyfully informed Robinson’s gunner, Guardsman Leslie Johnson: ‘You guys are the most beautiful sight I’ve seen for years!’ The time was 19:15 on Wednesday 20 September and the Nijmegen road bridge, along with the adjacent railway bridge, was finally in Allied hands.39
Sergeant Robinson had no way of knowing but his progress across the road bridge was being monitored by Brigadeführer Heinz Harmel, commander of 10 SS Panzer Division, from atop a bunker in Lent at the north end of the bridge. The commander of Heeresgruppe B, Generalfeldmarschall Walther Model, had categorically forbidden the destruction of the Nijmegen bridges because he considered them vital for a subsequent German counter-offensive, although this was not universally accepted by the commanders tasked with their preservation. Obergruppenführer Bittrich for one, commanding II SS Panzerkorps, was sceptical that any such counter-offensive was likely to materialise and felt that the bridges should have been demolished as a precautionary measure. His view was shared by Harmel, who resolved to destroy the road bridge rather than allow it to fall intact into Allied hands. The bridge had been wired with at least 500 pounds of explosive in specially configured demolition charges on 8 September as part of the general preparations to meet the Allied ground advance, although not all the charges were laid and wired as doing so would have prevented traffic moving freely across it.40 Harmel had SS Panzer Pionier Bataillon 10 run a firing trigger for the charges out to a specially constructed bunker at Lent at the north end of the bridge that was permanently manned, and a party of Untersturmführer Baumgärtel’s men were also charged with maintaining the integrity of the charges and their all-important wiring. Watching through binoculars in the gathering dusk, Harmel waited until the British tanks were in the middle of the span before ordering the duty SS Pionier to detonate the charges.
Nothing happened. A second working of the detonator firing circuit elicited the same lack of response and the commander of 10 SS Panzer Division watched helplessly as the tanks advanced down the north ramp. Harmel withdrew to his HQ in Bemmel, where he learned that the railway bridge had also fallen intact, and ordered his staff to organise blocks on the roads leading to Arnhem from Lent and Elst with the remnants of SS Panzer Regiment 10 and SS Panzergrenadier Regiment 22 and whatever other forces they could muster. He then telephoned II SS Panzerkorps and instructed the staff officer who replied, ‘Tell Bittrich that they’re over the Waal.’41 Why the emplaced demolition charges failed to detonate is an ongoing mystery. The deed of cutting the command wires is popularly attributed to a member of the Dutch Resistance named Jan van Hoof who reportedly sneaked onto the bridge and cut the wires on 18 September before being killed the following day. On the other hand Captain Burriss had ordered his men to cut all the wires they could find on reaching the road bridge, Lieutenant Jones cut a number of wires leading to the emplaced charge when he followed the tanks onto the bridge and they may also have been cut by mortar and artillery fire. Whoever was responsible, it was extremely fortunate for Sergeant Robinson, who was later awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his part in the action; two of his men received the Military Medal.
The link-up between the 504th Regiment’s paratroopers and the Grenadier Guards’ tanks did not bring the fighting at either end of the bridge to an immediate halt. Captain Burriss’s little band was joined by other elements of the 3rd Battalion 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, including Major Cook, who set about clearing elements of SS Panzer Pionier Bataillon 10 from the immediate area around the bridge ramp. The fighting lasted until midnight while the foothold on the north bank of the Waal was reinforced by more Shermans from Sergeant Robinson’s No. 1 Squadron, the M10 tank-destroyers of B and C Troops, Q Battery 21st Anti-Tank Regiment RA at around 19:30, followed later by two companies from the 3rd Irish Guards.42 Back at the south end of the bridge, isolated pockets of German troops continued to fight on in the parkland by the bridge ramp. At the citadel mound in the Valkhofpark, Hauptsturmführer Krüger, the Forward Observer for SS Artillerie Ausbildungs und Ersatz Regiment 5, continued to call in artillery fire via radio and then Verey lights until contact was lost at 19:30 and then organised a last-ditch defensive position in the trenches around a first-aid bunker until his third wounding in the action put him out of commission. The position was finally overwhelmed at around 20:30 and SS survivors claimed that Krüger and a number of other SS prisoners were executed by their captors. At the Haus Robert Janssen HQ in the adjacent Hunnerpark, Hauptsturmführer Euling and sixty survivors of the earlier assault had withdrawn to the rear of the blazing building where they remained unmolested until the fire finally drove them out at 22:30. Euling then organised a breakout, leading the party on a circuitous route north through the Valkhofpark to the River Waal and thence eastward under the bridge ramp and on to safety; he was subsequently awarded the Knight’s Cross in recognition of his leadership during the battle in Nijmegen.43 The cost of the fight for the parkland was heavy on both sides. The 505th Regiment’s Company F lost nineteen dead and fifty wounded clearing the Hunnerpark for example, and ended the fight with only fifty men still fit to fight. Almost all of the approximately 600-strong German force holding the parkland at the south end of the road bridge was killed, along with another eighty on the bridge or in the fight to extend the foothold in Lent.44
At the north end of the road bridge Major Cook’s paratroopers had fully expected the Guards Armoured Division to push on immediately for Arnhem, just ten miles up the road, and their elation slowly turned to anger as the growing British force remained immobile. Lieutenant Ernest Patrick Murphy from the 3rd Battalion 504th Regiment climbed aboard Sergeant Robinson’s tank and urged him to move, only to be informed by the otherwise willing Robinson that he had no orders to do so. Captain Burriss was reportedly so furious he threatened the deputy commander of No. 1 Squadron, Captain The Lord Peter Carrington, with his Thompson Gun; Carrington wisely dropped inside his tank and locked the hatch. Having paid in blood to secure the bridges their ire was understandable, and it was shared by their Regimental commander Colonel Tucker who was overheard in an acrimonious exchange with an unknown British major in a Command Post near the bridge ramp.45 The depth of Tucker’s anger is apparent from Gavin’s recollection of visiting Tucker in the early morning of 21 September: ‘Tucker was livid. I had never seen him so angry…His first question to me was, “What in the hell are they doing? We have been in this position for over twelve hours and all they seem to be doing is brewing tea.” I did not have an answer for him.’46 The puzzlement was shared by at least one British officer. Lieutenant Brian Wilson’s platoon from the 3rd Irish Guards had been among the first to cross the road bridge in the wake of Sergeant Robinson’s
Troop, and after a night of immobility Wilson unsuccessfully sought enlightenment at his 2nd Company HQ: ‘As far as I could discover…Nijmegen was fairly well cleared…The situation at Arnhem remained desperate. Yet the GAD did not move.’47 The Americans’ incomprehension was matched by their German opponents. In Harmel’s view the British failure to advance rapidly north from the Nijmegen bridge squandered the last chance to reach the British Airborne troops who were at that time still clinging to the north end of the Arnhem road bridge, because at that time there were virtually no German troops between Nijmegen and Arnhem; that remained the case for up to sixteen hours until the Germans were able to fully access the Arnhem bridge at midday on 21 September and begin to channel reinforcements south. By halting after securing the Nijmegen road bridge the Guards Armoured Division and by extension 30 Corps effectively handed the hard-won initiative back to II SS Panzerkorps, which used the time to once again erect an effective defence where none had existed, as the Irish Guards Group discovered when it finally attempted to resume the advance at 13:30 on 21 September.
Quite why the Guards Armoured Division failed to push on after crossing the Nijmegen road bridge remains controversial and is almost invariably attributed to the difficulty in passing reinforcements up the Airborne Corridor and to Major-General Adair’s formation being too badly stretched in defending the Corridor between Veghel and Nijmegen, the 82nd Airborne’s perimeter, having supported the fight to secure the Nijmegen bridges. It has been said Adair was reluctant to launch his tanks into unknown territory, although the opposite claim that he delayed the advance after seeing the terrain north of Nijmegen is rather unlikely given that it was almost dark when the Nijmegen road bridge was taken, and Adair cannot therefore have had a clear look at what lay ahead until after dawn on 21 September, almost twelve hours after the event.48 To be fair, the 2nd Grenadier Guards tanks required refuelling and replenishment after the fight to secure the road bridge, although given the urgency of the circumstances this ought to have been achievable with some application. More importantly, the 2nd Irish Guards appear to have been available and capable of continuing the advance after its fire support mission for the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s river crossing, given that it moved across the bridge in the early hours of 21 September, where the 3rd Irish Guards were already in place to act in their customary support role. However, it is difficult to avoid at least the suspicion that the failure to press on was simply another manifestation of the Guards adhering to the same modus operandi they had followed from the outset of Operation GARDEN, again, with no acknowledgement that extraordinary times required extraordinary measures. Over and above that, the root of the problem was a failure by the British senior commanders: as Powell points out, maintaining a reserve for unforeseen circumstances or exploitation is a basic military principle at every level of warfare but this, for whatever reason, was not done at Nijmegen.49 Even if a full-scale push north was not feasible it ought to have been possible for the Guards Armoured Division to expand the thousand yards or so cleared by Lieutenant-Colonel Tucker’s paratroopers; this would have provided a wider base from which to launch a subsequent drive and might well have disrupted the Germans in establishing their defences. The Guards Armoured Division and by extension 30 Corps thus stand condemned not for failing, but for failing to try. In the event the 1st Airborne Division, the 43rd Division ‒ and ironically the Guards themselves ‒ were to pay a high price for that failure over the next few days.
Major-General Gavin had been called away from the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s crossing point at 13:30 by a frantic call from his Chief-of-Staff Lieutenant Robert Wienicke, reporting that a renewal of the German attack on the south-eastern section of the 82nd Airborne Division’s perimeter was on the verge of overrunning Beek, Wyler and Mook and the Molenhoek bridge. Gavin drove immediately to his HQ at Groesbeek where he was surprised to find an unannounced Major-General Matthew B. Ridgeway, commander of the US 18th Airborne Corps. Ridgeway had travelled up the Airborne Corridor on his own initiative, apparently without any legitimate reason other than discontent that the two US Airborne divisions were under Browning’s command – and more generally piqued at Browning being appointed over him to deputy command of the 1st Allied Airborne Army. Having more important things to attend to than glad-handing unheralded senior commanders, and given that Ridgeway was engaged in discussion with his staff officers, Gavin instructed Lieutenant Wienicke to pass on his apologies at having to leave and promised to return as soon as possible before leaving for Mook. This was not the end of the matter. Two weeks later Gavin received a letter from Ridgeway accusing Gavin of a ‘flagrant breach of military courtesy’ by failing to acknowledge his Corps commander’s presence. Gavin responded in his invariably correct manner by explaining the rather obvious extenuating reasons for his behaviour and tendering his resignation from command of the 82nd Airborne Division and from further command in the US 18th Airborne Corps, even if this entailed a reduction in rank; unsurprisingly his offer was not taken up and the matter appears to have been quietly dropped.50 It is interesting to speculate on what Gavin made of being hindered by two egocentric and self-serving senior commanders during arguably the most demanding and complex military operation he had fought in.
On the northern outskirts of Mook near a railway underpass Gavin found the only thing seemingly standing between the advancing elements of Kampfgruppe Hermann and the Molenhoek bridge was a single rather shaken paratrooper with a Bazooka, a single Sherman tank from the 1st (Armoured) Battalion Coldstream Guards and a daisy chain of mines laid across the road. As Gavin watched, the Sherman backed onto one of the mines while manoeuvring, losing a track. He ordered his aide, Captain Hugo Olsen, and a Sergeant Wood to engage the advancing Germans from a nearby embankment and despatched his driver back to the Coldstream Guards Group with a request for immediate tank support.51 In fact the 1st Battalion 505th Regiment was already reorganising and Regimental commander Colonel William E. Ekman, already mindful of the threat to the Molenhoek bridge, had deployed his Company A reserve and tanks from the 1st Coldstream Guards were already on the way. As a result, Ekman was able to launch a counter-attack under an hour after Mook had been overrun that, after some bitter house-to-house fighting, had retaken the town by nightfall and pushed Kampfgruppe Hermann back the way it had come; Colonel Ekman only called off the pursuit because his men were running out of ammunition. A further German withdrawal during the night allowed the paratroopers to reoccupy Riethorst and re-establish the roadblock at Plasmolen the following morning. The day’s fighting cost the 1st Battalion 505th Regiment thirty-three dead, seventy-six wounded and seven missing; German casualties are unclear but Kampfgruppe Hermann did not figure in subsequent German attacks on the 82nd Airborne Division’s perimeter.52
Once he was satisfied Colonel Ekman had matters in hand at Mook, Gavin drove north to see the situation on the eastern aspect of the Divisional perimeter. After a morning of bombardment from artillery and mortars, in the early afternoon Kampfgruppe von Fürstenberg attacked the two US platoons holding Beek, one from Company I 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment and one from Company D 307th Airborne Engineer Battalion. The US force was commanded by Corporal Robert Chisolm as all the detachment’s officers and senior NCOs had been killed or wounded the previous day securing the town. In a ‘stunning display of junior leadership’ Chisolm co-ordinated the defence of the town until direct fire from several 20mm flak vehicles and an intensive artillery barrage heralded the final German assault. He then organised an orderly withdrawal back onto the Berg-en-Dal ridge, personally acting as rearguard.53 It appears to have been Corporal Chisolm’s recently arrived party that Gavin encountered digging in after arriving at the Berg-en-Dal, where German small-arms fire had obliged him to crawl across the crest to reach the forward slope. Lieutenant-Colonel Louis G. Mendez, commander of the 3rd Battalion 508th Regiment, informed Gavin that his men had blocked the advance of Kampfgruppe von Fürstenberg’s armour, reported to number eight
tanks and as many assorted half-tracks, by knocking out one of the latter on a sharp S-bend on the road leading uphill from Beek, thereby blocking the road. Mendez also told Gavin that he had only been able to impede the German advance thus far by constantly switching his platoons between locations as new threats developed, and he was unsure how long he could continue to do so. Reinforcements were desperately needed, but the non-arrival of that day’s glider lift meant Gavin simply had no resources to give. Fortunately, the situation was saved by von Fürstenberg curtailing the attack with the onset of darkness and a spoiling attack on Beek from the south by Lieutenant Louis G. Toth’s Company H from the 508th Regiment at some point after 19:00. After becoming fragmented after penetrating into the town in darkness, Company H renewed the attack at first light on 21 September and after reinforcement with elements from Companies F and G and making four separate attacks in the course of the day, Lieutenant Toth finally secured Beek at 18:00.54
The 3rd Battalion’s stubborn defence also appears to have alleviated the pressure on the 1st Battalion 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment from Kampfgruppe Becker along with Captain Woodrow W. Millsaps’ Company B, which was holding Wyler to the east of the main 1st Battalion frontage. The action began when one of Captain Millsaps’ roadblocks was approached by a truck carrying German infantry at 08:00, which began to burn after being hit by one of the 57mm anti-tank guns from Battery B 80th Airborne Anti-Aircraft Battalion attached to Company B. The Germans responded by moving in on the town with more and more troops including a machine-gun kompanie, which Millsaps managed to keep at bay with fire from the 319th Glider Field Artillery Battalion. The Germans then brought up StuGs likely belonging to Fallschirm Sturmgeschütze Brigade 12. The two 57mm anti-tank guns from the 80th Airborne Anti-Aircraft Battalion were unable to move to engage them because of intense German machine-gun fire. By the early afternoon the German pressure on Captain Millsaps’ little band was continuing to grow, almost all of the two Jeep-loads of ammunition Company B had brought with it had been expended and a resupply attempt by the Battalion Supply Officer Lieutenant Peter L. Kelley had been beaten back by enemy fire. Wyler was under direct fire from the StuGs and increasing indirect fire from heavy artillery. The pressure continued to mount and by around 15:00 Millsaps was obliged to inform Lieutenant-Colonel Shields Warren bluntly that if he was not given permission to withdraw to an earlier intermediate position just south of Wyler, then Company B would be overrun and wiped out; this was granted by the Battalion Executive Officer Major Benjamin F. Delamater, although it took over an hour to carry out the withdrawal as all Millsaps men were wounded and he refused to leave the non-ambulatory cases behind. The withdrawal was covered by fire from tanks, presumably from the 1st Coldstream Guards, but the fire initially fell on Company B’s new location, reportedly killing and wounding several of the paratroopers before a bed sheet was used to advertise the friendly location to the tanks. At dusk, permission was granted for a further withdrawal to the main 1st Battalion line and Major Delamater went forward to act as a guide. The withdrawal took all night as, once again, Captain Millsaps refused to abandon his non-ambulatory wounded. As there were insufficient able-bodied men to move all the wounded at once, they had to be moved in a series of relays using doors, planks or whatever was available. There were no stretchers. Despite all this the withdrawal was successful and Company B was back within the 1st Battalion lines by dawn on 21 September.55