This attitude was not shared universally across the Guards Armoured Division, however. Lieutenant Brian Wilson from the 3rd Irish Guards later considered it ‘shameful’ that his Division had remained immobile for eighteen hours after the Nijmegen bridges had been secured.78 Lieutenant John Gorman MC, a Troop commander in the 2nd Irish Guards, was equally forthright, and his comment is worth quoting in full:
We had come all the way from Normandy, taken Brussels, fought halfway through Holland and crossed the Nijmegen bridge, Arnhem and those paratroopers were just up ahead and, almost within sight of that last bloody bridge, we were stopped. I never felt such morbid despair.79
The more laissez-faire attitude at the upper echelon of the Guards Armoured Division’s chain of command prevailed however, and another precious twenty-four hours were allowed to slip by while the 1st Airborne Division continued to fight for its life.
***
While the Irish Guards were stalled before Ressen and the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade was landing and reorganising, their counterparts on the north bank of the Lower Rhine were carrying out what would become the final two voluntary adjustments to the Oosterbeek perimeter. In the late afternoon the 7th KOSB had been ordered to withdraw to a narrower frontage in a wood behind their existing positions in order to reduce the 400-yard gap on the Battalion’s left flank with the 21st Independent Company, although compliance was delayed by the German attack at 16:30. Lieutenant-Colonel Payton-Reid carried out the move in the immediate aftermath of his successful counter-attack while the enemy were still off balance and to take advantage of the remaining daylight; the move proved to be additionally fortuitous because the day’s fighting had reduced the 7th KOSB’s strength to 150 all ranks.80 In addition, a burning Jeep had set fire to the building housing the overflowing Battalion RAP, putting the casualties at risk from the flames and detonating ammunition stowed in the vehicle. The wounded were therefore evacuated by Jeep to either the 21st Independent Company’s RAP or the Division MDS at the Hotel Schoonoord, while the new position was reconnoitred by Captain David Clayhills, who had been elevated to Battalion second-in-command. The moved commenced at around 18:00 with B and D Companies covering toward the east and was carried out without incident, with all movable equipment being brought out apart from a number of Jeeps damaged by artillery and small-arms fire. The Battalion’s left flank was then tied into the 21st Independent Company’s position and two 6-Pounders and a Mortar Section were deployed in the latter’s perimeter, which was considered to be ‘of great assistance’. Another 6-Pounder was deployed in the 4th Parachute Squadron’s location.81
While Payton-Reid’s men were digging in Urquhart held a conference at his HQ and decided to contract the northern face of the Divisional perimeter yet further, giving sole responsibility for the sector to the 7th KOSB and withdrawing the Independent Company and Captain Henry Brown’s detachment from the 4th Parachute Squadron into the Division reserve.82 Colonel Payton-Reid only became aware of the decision when the Independent Company received its withdrawal order at some point before 21:30; the order did not go down well with Major Wilson, who was of the view that his Ommershof location could have been held ‘indefinitely’.83 Payton-Reid sought clarification from 1st Airlanding Brigade HQ via a ‘long and fruitless’ radio exchange that ended with Captain Colin Macduff-Duncan being sent forward to Payton-Reid’s location with a map trace of the new line on the Ommershoflaan, around 200 yards south of the Battalion’s original position on the Graaf van Rechterenweg. The move began at 21:30 and was again carried out without incident, with the Battalion setting up a three-sided perimeter around Battalion HQ and Mortar Group; the 6-Pounder guns were deployed covering the roads leading into the position from north, east and west, while the MMG Group’s Vickers were set up in woods on the Battalion’s left flank, also covering the northern approaches. To the east the Battalion’s flank was tied into the positions on the Stationsweg occupied by the Reconnaissance Squadron and 156 Parachute Battalion, and to the west with the Glider Pilots from E and F Squadrons.84
The other adjustment occurred on the eastern face of the Division perimeter and not solely at Urquhart’s behest. Kampfgruppe Möller had maintained the pressure on the west-central sector for most of the day and by 18:40 had reoccupied the area around the MDS in the Hotels Schoonoord and Vreewijk on the east side of the Utrechtseweg–Stationsweg crossroads, although it is unclear if they actually entered the makeshift hospitals. In the process Möller’s men drove back the remnants of the 10th Parachute Battalion to just east of the crossroads by 20:10.85 The planned British withdrawal took place to the south of the crossroads in the sector held by LONSDALE Force. The 1st and 3rd Parachute Battalions held back Kampfgruppe Harder from the sodden polder south of the Benedendorpsweg until mid-afternoon, when Major Lonsdale gained permission to withdraw them to a section of the Divisional perimeter held by Major Cain and the 2nd South Staffords near the Oosterbeek Old Church. The 3rd Parachute Battalion moved first at 15:30, presumably because it occupied the most far flung section of the line, followed thirty minutes later by the 1st Parachute Battalion; the latter lost eight casualties to heavy enemy fire in doing so.86 The withdrawal was covered by an artillery barrage, although it is unclear if the shelling came from the Airlanding Light Regiment, the 64th Medium Regiment, or both.87
On reaching the relative security of the new line the paratroopers were permitted a brief respite in the blacked-out Oosterbeek Old Church during which they were treated to a morale-bolstering speech delivered from the pulpit by Major Lonsdale in person, his head swathed in a field dressing and with one arm in a sling:
You know as well as I do there are a lot of bloody Germans coming at us. Well, all we can do is to stay here and hang on in the hope that somebody catches us up. We must fight for our lives and stick together. We’ve fought the Germans before – in North Africa, Sicily, Italy. They weren’t good enough for us then, and they’re bloody well not good enough for us now. They’re up against the finest soldiers in the world. An hour from now you will take up defensive positions north of the road outside. Make certain you dig in well and that your weapons and ammo are in good order. We are getting short of ammo, so when you shoot you shoot to kill. Good luck to you all.88
It is unclear if the two Parachute Battalions attended the Oosterbeek Old Church together or separately, but the fact that Lonsdale went to the trouble of writing out the speech on a dismounted door placed conveniently in sight of the pulpit suggests multiple reading. Whichever, the paratroopers cleaned their weapons, catnapped and ate whatever rations they had left as they lounged in the old wooden pews. The scene was witnessed by Major Alan Bush, the 3rd Parachute Battalion’s second-in-command, who proudly commented on seeing the ‘filthy, tired men cleaning their rifles – well trained men those were’.89
Major Bush had just regained the Division perimeter after becoming separated during the fight on the riverside Onderlangs on 18 September, and as ranking officer found himself promoted to command the 1st Parachute Brigade, albeit a shadow of the formation which had landed with such confidence five days earlier. The 1st Parachute Battalion mustered approximately 100 men commanded led by Lieutenant Albert Turrell and the Battalion FOO Captain William Caird; the latter had assumed command after Lieutenant John Williams was wounded, presumably during the withdrawal to the church. The 3rd Parachute Battalion was in even worse shape, numbering just forty-three men including Lieutenant James Cleminson and another unidentified officer, possibly Lieutenant Philip Evans from the 2nd South Staffords’ C Company. It is unclear precisely who was in command of the 3rd Battalion at this point, as the irascible Captain Dorrien-Smith, who had assumed command of the 3rd Battalion on its withdrawal to Oosterbeek on the afternoon of 19 September, had been killed at some point on 21 September. In addition, Major Bush could call upon the services of around a dozen Glider Pilots from D Squadron, two men from the 2nd Parachute Battalion and one from the 1st Airlanding Anti-tank Battery. With their brief resp
ite over, the 3rd Parachute Battalion contingent joined Major Cain’s group from the 2nd South Staffords dug in near the Laundry where they spent yet another night digging in. The larger group from the 1st Parachute Battalion occupied a new position in houses and gardens north of the Benedendorpsweg where it was heavily shelled and mortared at 21:00. A quiet night followed. The day’s fighting had cost the 1st Parachute Battalion two dead and ten wounded; the total presumably included the eight casualties sustained during the late afternoon withdrawal to the Oosterbeek Old Church.90
Whilst not decisive, II SS Panzerkorps attacks on the 1st Airborne Division’s perimeter had nonetheless yielded useful results by nightfall on 21 September. While the attacks against sections of the east and western faces of the perimeter had been rebuffed, the northern face had been pushed back several hundred yards, in part because of the poor defensive quality of the Graaf van Rechterenweg position. Ground had also been gained on both sides of the base of the perimeter, where LONSDALE Force and the 1st Border’s B Company were almost back-to-back, raising the prospect of pinching the British perimeter away from the Lower Rhine altogether. The Allied crossing of the River Waal at Nijmegen and more immediately the arrival of the bulk of the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade south of the Lower Rhine rendered this objective the more important, and Bataillon Worrowski’s driving back of the elements of the 1st Border holding the north end of the Heveadorp ferry helped toward that objective, albeit inadvertently.
On the other hand, the day’s fighting had also shown that the British Airborne troops at Oosterbeek were no less skilled and aggressive than those encountered at the Arnhem road bridge, and the brutal fighting necessary to combat them was taking an increasing toll on the German units involved. Sturmann Alfred Ziegler, the motorcycle despatch rider from SS Panzerjäger Abteilung 9, recalled his 120-strong contingent being reduced to a mere twenty-one in the course of the day. This prompted the commander of Kampfgruppe Bruhn to send a message to Hauptsturmführer von Allwörden warning him that if he did not withdraw his few surviving men left in the line, ‘there would be none of the original tank destroyer crews left’. Wary of British artillery and mortar fire, Ziegler took a novel approach when given time to rest: ‘I dug a hole near the bridge over the railway line, pulled my motorcycle [combination] over the top of it for protection against overhead shrapnel and fell asleep at the bottom of it.’91
Whilst his units were busy reorganising and resting, Obersturmbannführer Harzer was making good use of the direct link between 9 SS Panzer Division HQ and Heeresgruppe B. On receiving complaints from Harzer that his men lacked the means to assault the British-held houses effectively, Generalfeldmarschall Model immediately ordered a supply of flamethrowers brought forward from supply dumps and assigned Harzer Pionier Lehr Bataillon 9, a specialist unit trained and equipped for house-to-house fighting; the Bataillon was flown into Deelen airfield by a shuttle of Junkers 52 transports on the nights of 21-22 and 22-23 September.92 Despite the rising cost, the German attacks on the 1st Airborne Division’s perimeter were slowly bearing fruit, and were therefore to continue the following day, incorporating lessons from the fighting at the Arnhem road bridge as well as those gained at Oosterbeek.
17
D Plus 5
00:01 to 23:59 Friday 22 September 1944
On the south bank of the Lower Rhine the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade spent the early hours of Friday 22 September waiting to move across the Lower Rhine to Oosterbeek. Major-General Sosabowski was joined at 01:00, during or shortly after the end of his midnight conference, by Lieutenant David Storrs from the 1st Airborne Division’s HQ Royal Engineers. Storrs had been supervising a party of Sappers from the 9th Field Company under a Lance-Sergeant Green attempting to convert Jeep trailers into rafts from 20:00 the previous evening.1 It is unclear if Storrs swam the river or crossed in an inflatable reconnaissance boat, but he announced that one of the improvised rafts was ‘almost completed’ and reiterated the report delivered earlier by Captain Zwolanski that the British would launch a covering attack to secure a section of the north bank along with details of a proposed new crossing site east of the Heveadorp ferry terminal. Sosabowski therefore had his men in place at the proposed crossing site by 02:00 despite German artillery fire, and there the exhausted paratroopers settled down to wait. By 03:00, with no sign of the rafts or the covering attack, Sosabowski decided that there was ‘no possibility of crossing at this night’ and ordered a move back to Driel, which was completed by 05:30. Once there the largely intact 2nd Battalion formed an all-round defence perimeter while the badly understrength 3rd Battalion acted as a reserve, with two platoons deployed in outposts to the south and south-east.2 Lieutenant Storrs returned to the north bank, accompanied by Captain Zwolanski and the Polish Brigade’s British liaison officer, Lieutenant-Colonel George Stevens. Stevens arrived at the Hotel Hartenstein at 05:15 and after giving a situation report presented Major-General Urquhart with a gift:
He [Stevens] had no news about XXX Corps’ efforts to effect our relief, but he had considerately brought a copy of Thursday morning’s Times which he pressed into my hand with due aplomb. ‘You will find there are some references to the operation, sir,’ he said…Not by what it said, but because it was in my hands, The Times lent a momentary and purely artificial security to our position; it represented our first link with the outside world.3
The morale boost generated by Lieutenant-Colonel Stevens’ copy of The Times was reinforced an hour later at 06:17 and again at 07:40 by signals from 1st Airborne Corps HQ at Moor Park. The first informed Urquhart that the 43rd Division would be taking over from Guards Armoured Division at first light and would be advancing to the Oosterbeek [Heveadorp] ferry; the second reiterated the 43rd Division’s line of advance, that it had been ordered to ‘take all risks to effect relief today’ and that ‘if situation warrants you should withdraw to or cross the ferry’.4 The latter caveat provides an early intimation that the commander of the 43rd Division, Major-General Ivor Thomas, had not properly grasped the rapidly deteriorating reality of the 1st Airborne Division’s plight; Urquhart expressed his suspicion that this was the case at the time, which was subsequently confirmed to be absolutely correct.5
Whilst Urquhart did not become aware of it for some hours, another link with the outside world occurred shortly thereafter, albeit on the other side of the Lower Rhine. During the night of 21-22 September Major-General Sosabowski ordered the commander of the 3rd Battalion’s Reconnaissance Section, 2nd Lieutenant Jerzy Bereda-Fialkowski, to take a patrol south toward Nijmegen in an effort to make contact with the Allied troops that had crossed the River Waal in the evening of 20 September. After selecting three men and drawing additional ammunition and possibly commandeered bicycles, Lieutenant Bereda-Fialkowski led his little band out of the Driel perimeter through the hamlet of Honingsveld at 06:00 toward Elst, four miles or so to the south, using the pre-dawn gloom and early morning mist for cover. On reaching a point just north of Elst the patrol settled down for a time to observe. They estimated German strength in Elst at approximately fifty men, possibly buttressed with armoured vehicles; four German tanks were observed moving west from the northern outskirts of Elst and a pair of armoured cars moving north toward Driel. Bereda-Fialkowski then side-slipped toward Valburg, three miles to the west, where they found no sign of the German tanks or Allied troops but received the usual rapturous welcome from the locals. After enjoying the adulation for a while the patrol pushed on toward the village of Andelst, a further three miles to the west. It was at this point they were overtaken on the misty road by a quartet of British reconnaissance vehicles.6
The vehicles, two Daimler Dingo Scout Cars and two Daimler Armoured Cars, belonged to 5 Troop, C Squadron 2nd Household Cavalry Regiment commanded by Captain Lord Richard Wrottesley. An expedient unit formed by amalgamating personnel from the Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards initially dubbed the Household Cavalry Training Regiment, the unit was renamed the 2nd Household Cava
lry Regiment and assigned to the Guards Armoured Division in September 1941 before being reassigned to the British 2nd Army as a Corps-level reconnaissance asset in July 1943. It served in that role with the British 8 and 30 Corps following the D-Day landings and, in a presumably coincidental hat tip to its origin, spearheaded the Guards Armoured Division’s advance up the Airborne Corridor, making first contact with the US 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions in the process. After reaching the 82nd Airborne Division’s perimeter south of Nijmegen in the morning of 19 September, C Squadron spent two days escorting truck convoys moving materiel from a captured German supply depot at Oss, eighteen miles west of Nijmegen, before receiving fresh orders in the evening of Thursday 21 September. The Squadron was to scout ahead for an attack across the Betuwe scheduled to begin at 10:00 by the 43rd Division, which was to take over the lead for Operation GARDEN from the Guards Armoured Division, and specifically make contact with the Polish Parachute Brigade reportedly holding the crossing place at Driel.7
The task of establishing contact with the Polish paratroopers was assigned to Captain Wrottesley’s 5 Troop, Lieutenant Arthur Young’s 2 Troop and a third Troop commanded by a Lieutenant H. S. Hopkinson. As Elst on the main route between Nijmegen and Driel remained in German hands, the plan was to bypass the town to the west before looping north to Driel via the network of smaller roads. 5 Troop led the way across the Nijmegen road bridge at first light on Friday 22 September. Using the mist and early morning gloom for cover the little convoy passed through the Allied lines near the village of Oosterhout and followed the north bank of the River Waal before angling inland to pass through Valburg and westward toward Andelst where they overtook Lieutenant Bereda-Fialkowski’s patrol; as the British vehicles had already encountered German troops on the road, the Polish paratroopers were perhaps lucky not have been shot up. After warning his British counterpart of the presence of German armour in the vicinity, Lieutenant Bereda-Fialkowski departed southward to reconnoitre the bank of the Waal; he and his patrol returned safely to the Driel that night.8 Captain Wrottesley’s vehicles angled north to Heteren and then east to the sector of the Driel perimeter held by the Poles’ 4th Company, arriving at some point between 08:00 and 08:50; by that time Operation MARKET GARDEN had been underway for approximately four days and eighteen hours.9 Fortuitously, Sosabowski was with 4th Company, in the midst of ordering a redeployment of Lance-Sergeant Cadet Hrechorow’s platoon from a bakery building to a position on a dyke, from where they could simultaneously control the road and overlook the riverbank. The armoured vehicles were then escorted to Sosabowski’s HQ in the centre of the village, where Captain Wrottesley transmitted a situation report that included his route.10 Although a radio link had finally been established between Sosabowski’s HQ and the Hotel Hartenstein at 09:05, Urquhart does not appear to have become aware of the arrival of the 2nd Household Cavalry patrol until 11:20, and then via a signal from 2nd Army HQ via the PHANTOM net.11
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