Major Wilson’s objections to maintaining the outpost on the Utrechtseweg proved to be justified. Possibly provoked by the relief activity, Kampfgruppe Möller attacked the Pathfinder’s No. 3 Platoon at 07:15, using the tactics developed in the fight at the Arnhem road bridge. In pouring rain and covered by a thick phosphorous smoke screen to prevent the main British positions at the Utrechtseweg‒Stationsweg crossroads from interfering, two Sturmgeschützen and what was reported as a Panzer IV tank began systematically to pump shells into the British-held houses until they collapsed, forcing the surviving Pathfinders to abandon their inadequate shelter. The unit War Diary implies that their subsequent withdrawal to the main British line at the crossroads was ordered by Major Wilson, but the semi-official history suggests it resulted from a less formal or orderly impulse. Several men were wounded or killed by the German pounding, the dead including Sergeant Dennis Martin. Others including Sergeant Paddy Cockings and his Section were taken prisoner.27 A number of men managed to withdraw to No. 1 Platoon’s positions on the crossroads, among them Lieutenant Ashmore and Sergeant Ernest Thompson, who had reportedly killed a number of German infantry with an improvised Gammon bomb as they moved into the garden of the collapsed building; he was described as ‘quite berserk’ on arrival at No. 1 Platoon’s location. Private Francis Hillier also made it back to the crossroads despite being wounded and was hit again in the throat when he returned to assist an injured comrade. He died of his injuries after the engagement.28 The fight for the outpost was over by 08:40.29
The Germans then renewed their assault along the entire eastern face of the 1st Airborne Division’s perimeter, although the precise degree of co-operation between the various units involved is hazy. After a particularly heavy artillery bombardment Kampfgruppe Harder’s attacked again along the riverside Benedendorpsweg against the positions held by LONSDALE Force, the remnants of the 2nd South Staffords and the 1st and 3rd Parachute Battalions protecting the 1st Airlanding Light Regiment’s 75mm Pack Howitzers. The attack followed the pattern of the previous day, with ‘continuous small engagements with venturesome tanks’ and German infantry ‘more hesitant in making close-range attacks’, although the constant sniping and frequency of the attacks made up for any lack of application; as the 3rd Parachute Battalion War Diary put it, attacks ‘were so frequent between this period and the time of withdrawal that it is impossible to give full details of each attack’.30 The thinly spread defenders received what reinforcements were available. At 11:00 the 11th Parachute Battalion contingent was recalled from its backstop position covering the municipal gasworks to the Oosterbeek Old Church for ‘food and weapon cleaning’ before being assigned new positions stretching west from the church, while the 1st Parachute Battalion were reinforced by twenty-one Glider Pilots at 20:00; it is unclear which Squadron the party were drawn from.31 The Airlanding Light Regiment’s 1 and 2 Batteries located just north and north-west of the Oosterbeek Old Church emerged unscathed from the constant mortaring and StuG attacks, although a StuG knocked out a pack howitzer belonging to 3 Battery dug in west of the Church. It is unclear if this occurred before or after Captain Anthony Taylor took command of 3 Battery in place of Major Arthur Norman-Walker, who had been killed by German mortar fire at 1st Airlanding Brigade HQ the previous day. Twenty of the twenty-one pack howitzers the Regiment had landed with on 17 September still remained in action.32 In an effort to increase close protection for the Airlanding Regiment, the 11th Parachute Battalion’s B Company, commanded by Lieutenant James Blackwood, was detailed to act as a ‘protection unit’ for the guns.33
Kampfgruppe Harder’s attacks in the vicinity of the Oosterbeek Old Church were held until the Germans broke contact covered by an especially heavy barrage at 18:00, but not without cost.34 The total number of British casualties in unclear but Lieutenant James Cleminson, who had spent the night of 18-19 September in the attic of No.14 Zwarteweg with Major-General Urquhart, was wounded and evacuated to the MDS at some point during the day; he was the last original Battalion officer still serving with the 3rd Parachute Battalion contingent.35 Major Guy Blacklidge, who may have been commanding the 11th Parachute Battalion at this point, was killed by German artillery fire near the Oosterbeek Old Church to which the German artillery paid regular attention, presumably because its tower provided a convenient aiming point in the heart of the British positions.36 Major John Simonds from HQ Company, 2nd South Staffords also died during the day, apparently whilst undergoing treatment for serious wounds sustained on 19 September.37
After eliminating Lieutenant Ashmore’s outpost and regrouping, Kampfgruppe Möller resumed its push along the Utrechtseweg against the 21st Independent Company’s main positions, specifically targeting that held by Lieutenant David Eastwood’s No. 1 Platoon on the Stationsweg running north from the junction with the Utrechtseweg, approaching through the park on the east side of the Stationsweg. However, in this instance the attack was less effective, perhaps initially owing to the smokescreen interfering with the armoured vehicles’ targeting abilities, but more importantly because the Pathfinders employed a counter-tactic of their own. It is unclear if it was the result of a centrally generated order but Sergeant Benjamin Swallow ordered his men out of the fortified Hotel Strijland at No. 6 into the hotel grounds and Sergeant Ronald Kent did the same from No. 4 next door. This allowed the defenders to avoid the worst effects of the sustained close-range shelling from the German armoured vehicles and to engage the German infantry on a more equal footing when they moved in to mop up, although the subsequent fight was still fierce. Private John Avallone was killed manning a Bren in the grounds and Sergeant Swallow was severely wounded after reoccupying the hotel proper, to the extent he died of his wounds almost three weeks later.38 No. 1 Platoon also lost Corporal Hans Rosenfeld, who was reportedly killed by a mortar bomb whilst sheltering in his slit trench, although another account refers to him being struck in the neck by a ricochet of some kind.39 Sergeant Thompson, the berserker from No. 3 Platoon, was also killed, one of the fifteen dead and wounded suffered by No. 3 Platoon that day.40
The traffic was not all one way. An unnamed cook from No. 2 Platoon, which was holding positions on the Pietersbergseweg opposite and to the right of the MDS in the Hotel Schoonoord south of the crossroads, reportedly knocked out a StuG with a borrowed PIAT and Private Avallone was credited with shooting up a German ammunition truck on the Utrechtseweg and setting it ablaze. The vehicle must have become disoriented to end up in the front line, and it was not the only instance of such confusion during the fight. Private Alfred Jones from No. 1 Platoon recalled a motorcycle combination blithely pulling up outside the house next door to the one his Platoon was occupying and a German officer dismounting to approach the building. Both officer and driver were hit and wounded when Jones and his comrades recovered from their surprise and opened fire. The German casualties were subsequently recovered and evacuated across the Utrechtseweg to the MDS by an unnamed Medical Officer.41
The German attack also extended north from the Utrechtseweg‒Stationsweg crossroads to the houses on the Stationsweg held by Major Geoffrey Powell and his hundred-strong contingent from 156 Parachute Battalion, including fifteen Glider Pilot reinforcements from D Squadron, and on their left A and D Troops from the 1st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron commanded by Captain David Allsop from his HQ near the Hotel Hartenstein. In addition to the constant mortar and artillery bombardment the houses came under heavy and sustained machine-gun and small-arms fire from 08:00, with infantry attacks from the area of woodland east of the Stationsweg. An assault gun from Sturmgeschütze Brigade 280, likely a Sturmhaubitze (StuH) 42, was roaming among the British-occupied buildings west of the Stationsweg.42 Trooper Frank Mann from the Reconnaissance Squadron’s A Troop resolved to ambush the vehicle using the Troop’s single PIAT, accompanied by 2 Section Sergeant Gwyn Williams. The pair took up position in a slit-trench opposite the burned-out bakery on the junction of the Mariaweg and the Paul Krugerstraat; the trench was so deep th
at Williams acted as a human platform for Mann to kneel on. When the StuH duly appeared after around half an hour, Mann waited until it was only a few yards away before letting loose with the PIAT and succeeded in blowing off one of its tracks, although the German crew promptly responded with a 105mm shell that exploded just in front of the trench. Both men were temporarily buried but dug their way out, losing the PIAT in the process, and reached the shelter of a nearby house despite intense fire from the immobilised vehicle’s MG34 that killed and wounded Glider Pilots occupying an adjacent trench. The German crew abandoned their vehicle and Trooper Mann was subsequently awarded a US Distinguished Service Cross for his courageous action.43
In the meantime Brigadier Hackett had a brief ‘tete a tete’ [sic] at 09:00 with Captain Allsop in the latter’s slit trench presumably after visiting the 21st Independent, and he may have also called in to see Major Powell and 156 Parachute Battalion en route given the contiguous nature of the various unit positions.44 At 10:00 Captain John Park and the Reconnaissance Squadron’s D Troop holding the north-east shoulder of the perimeter came under sustained infantry attack supported by what were wrongly described in the unit War Diary as Mark VI tanks.45 Whatever the armoured vehicles actually were, they knocked out a 6-Pounder anti-tank gun emplaced in a shop window 200 yards behind D Troop HQ that unsuccessfully engaged them, wounding Lance-Corporal Robert Thomson and another D Troop Bren gunner posted as protection.46 The vehicles resumed the attack at 11:00 by systematically demolishing a forward outpost occupied by a Trooper Smith with two unnamed companions and commanded by Sergeant James Pyper. The latter later recalled how ‘the momentum of the shells carried them straight through both the outer and inner walls of the house, just as if the structure were made of cardboard.’ The two unnamed defenders were wounded in the course of the demolition.47 Although the unit War Diary and semi-official Reconnaissance Squadron account makes no mention of it, Sergeant Pyper braved the machine-gun and shell fire to request the assistance of stretcher bearers at D Troop HQ before returning to the demolished outpost and was carrying his wounded comrades back in person when the stretcher bearers arrived; he was subsequently awarded the Military Medal for his gallantry and additional acts the following day.48 Sergeant Pyper and the other unwounded survivor of his group, Trooper Smith, were then withdrawn to Troop HQ. Having eliminated Sergeant Pyper’s outpost, German infantry then attacked the main D Troop house on the Cronjéweg from the east at 15:00. The attack was rebuffed but a further effort from the east and north an hour later was more successful and at 16:30 the close-range shelling obliged Captain Park to order a withdrawal to another house 150 yards to the south. The attack cost two wounded, reducing D Troop to Captain Park, Lieutenant Alan Pascal and thirteen Other Ranks including Sergeant Pyper and Trooper Smith. At 17:00 Captain Allsop, who had himself been wounded by shrapnel earlier in the afternoon but ‘made do with first-aid in order to remain at his post’, appears to have ordered Captain Park to retake his original position.49 This was done at 17:30 without a fight as the Germans had withdrawn toward their original position, presumably to regroup for the night. The D Troop contingent then set about consolidating their old position with fresh trenches before maintaining listening posts through the night from 22:00.50
On Captain Park’s flank the bakery and adjacent house held by Captain Michael Grubb’s A Troop came under attack from a StuG that approached from the rear of the house at midday, which may have been the same vehicle that demolished Sergeant Pyper’s outpost, taking advantage of the breach thus created in the British line. Its arrival was inadvertently witnessed by Captain Grubb from the back garden: ‘I walked up through the vegetable plot…when I suddenly realized that there was a great long gun barrel, poking over the hedge at the bottom. It was either a tank or an SP gun, so I hastily withdrew.’ The StuG moved forward into the garden and began firing into the house. Corporal James Taylor recalled how ‘a great gaping hole suddenly appeared beside him’, while Lieutenant Douglas Galbraith was blown down the stairs, unscathed but rendered permanently partially deaf by the blast.51 The shelling again rapidly rendered the house untenable and A Troop fell back under heavy fire across the Mariaweg to two houses on the De la Reijweg, with Trooper Ronald Spicer carrying his rifle in one hand and a large, newly brewed container of tea in the other. Captain Grubb was seriously wounded in the foot during the withdrawal; according to the Troop War Diary he was evacuated to the MDS and command of A Troop devolved to Lieutenant Galbraith, but another source refers to him declining to be evacuated and continuing in command until the following day.52 Whichever was the case, A Troop fought a series of brief engagements with German patrols from 14:00 onward, during which it lost another man wounded. One of the Troop’s new positions consisted of a loft above a brick wash house connected to the house next door by a ‘mousehole’ knocked through the brickwork, occupied by Troopers Spicer, Kenneth Hope and Stanley Sutherby. The trio accounted for a number of German infantry moving between buildings by firing from slits in the timber superstructure, including an especially tall individual who inexplicably stopped in full view in an adjacent alleyway. He was felled by a burst of fire from Trooper Sutherby and ‘screamed for what seemed ages’; according to Lieutenant John Stevenson the Recce soldiers were unable to reach the German casualty because of sniper fire and resorted to singing ‘Lili Marlene’ in an effort to comfort him.53
The adjacent position on the Stationsweg occupied by 156 Parachute Battalion also came under attack at midday, first by what was reported as a Panther tank, disabled by the paratroopers’ single PIAT.54 The tank was replaced by a StuG that proceeded to systematically demolish the houses and as the Battalion’s PIAT had been lost or damaged and the shelling was causing ‘considerable casualties’, at 14:00 Major Powell ordered a withdrawal to a line fifty yards behind the Battalion’s existing position. A counter-attack an hour later led by Captain Raymond Stevens from No.1 Forward Observer Unit RA was repulsed by heavy German fire, with Captain Stevens reported killed in the attempt.55 In fact, he was badly wounded in the arm and abdomen and over several hours managed to crawl to the house occupied by Lieutenant Stevenson and Sergeant Maurice Riches from the Reconnaissance Squadron’s A Troop, where he died in the early hours of 24 September despite the best efforts of Sergeant Riches and some Dutch civilians sheltering in the cellar.56 With the failure of the counter-attack 156 Battalion dug in on the new line, where it was left unmolested by the Germans for the rest of the day, apart from very heavy mortar fire.57
An ever more acute problem for the 1st Airborne Division was the treatment and safety of its steadily increasing number of casualties. By 23 September, nine separate locations within the perimeter contained approximately 1,300 casualties and those locations were increasingly coming under fire as the perimeter contracted under German pressure. Major Guy Rigby-Jones from 181 Airlanding Field Ambulance had a narrow escape when the games room in the Hotel Tafelberg he was using as an operating theatre was hit by an artillery shell that destroyed all the surgical equipment. The Hotel Tafelberg was also serving as the HQ for the Division’s Assistant Director of Medical Services, Colonel Graeme Warrack. On another occasion a German mortar round blew in one of the Tafelberg’s bay windows, injuring the already wounded Major John Waddy from 156 Parachute Battalion in the foot, prompting an incensed Colonel Warrack to take to the street shouting ‘You bloody bastards! Can’t anybody recognise a Red Cross?’58 The MDS located in the hotels Schoonoord and Vreewijk, approximately 300 yards north-east of the Hotel Tafelberg straddling the Utrechtseweg–Stationsweg‒Pietersbergseweg crossroads, was especially vulnerable, as Kampfgruppe Möller’s advance along the Utrechtseweg had put it directly on the front line, which interfered with both side’s tactical freedom. From the German perspective the MDS buildings effectively masked sections of the British line, channelling or outright blocking lines of attack and preventing them from exerting control over the crossroads; at the same time the 21st Independent Company holding the houses immediate
ly west of the MDS complained that the MDS buildings provided the Germans with a covered conduit to approach the British positions. The Germans demanded the evacuation of the MDS on Friday 22 September, which was rejected by Major-General Urquhart on the not unreasonable grounds that there was simply nowhere else to relocate the facility within the slowly shrinking British perimeter. The Germans maintained the pressure on that sector of the perimeter the following day however, again using the MDS as a lever. In the early afternoon of Saturday 23 September Captain Stuart Mawson, the 11th Parachute Battalion’s Medical Officer who was serving as a surgeon at the MDS, witnessed the Hotel Schoonoord being occupied by members of an SS Regiment ‘of the toughest fibre. Aggressive and determined, and preoccupied entirely with the exigencies of battle, they appeared hardly to notice the sorry plight of the wounded, pushing them roughly out of the way to make room for their machine gun emplacements, and brooking no interference from those Medical Corps men who had the temerity to remonstrate with them.’59
Captain Mawson was imprisoned under armed guard for a time in the MDS’s makeshift operating theatre with Captain Clifford Simmons from 181 Parachute Field Ambulance and a number of other medical personnel, until they persuaded their captors to allow them upstairs to tend the casualties in the wards. On the way up he witnessed an extended argument between hospital commander Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Marrable speaking calmly but determinedly with two SS officers, citing the Geneva Convention and the equality of treatment the MDS staff had provided to wounded German POWs.60 One of the officers was probably Hauptsturmführer Dr Egon Skalka, 9 SS Panzer Division’s Senior Medical Officer, who had been despatched by Obersturmbannführer Harzer to arrange an evacuation of the MDS; Skalka was at this time running the St Elizabeth Hospital in the outskirts of Arnhem employing its original British medical staff and medical supplies gathered from British resupply drops.61 Skalka also appears to have been the officer who subsequently engaged Captain Mawson in French conversation on a ward after enquiring about the number of wounded in the MDS. After a discussion on the efficacy of different medication and treatments, the German officer admitted his reliance on captured British airdropped medical supplies and generously offered Mawson a Players cigarette from the same source.62 Lieutenant-Colonel Marrable’s quiet but determined diplomacy initially paid off, the threat to the MDS being lifted at 13:30 on the proviso that the British troops in the immediate vicinity refrained from firing. According to Captain Mawson the Germans also agreed to provide food and medical supplies, arrange evacuation of the seriously wounded as soon as possible and to remove their troops in the Hotel Schoonoord apart from sentries posted to prevent the ambulatory British casualties rejoining the fight, by 17:00. A German medical officer and a number of orderlies were also to remain to assist their British counterparts through the coming night and to help in any evacuation the following day.63 Over the course of the afternoon the SS did provide a quantity of supplies and cigarettes, removed their own wounded and a number of the more serious British casualties to ease the burden on the MDS, and by the 17:00 deadline had assembled their fighting troops, described by Mawson as ‘a formidable looking bunch’, in the hallway of the Hotel Schoonoord in readiness to withdraw.64 It was at this point that matters went awry as the SS came under small-arms fire whilst leaving the rear of the hotel, which drove them back inside for shelter. It is unclear whether the firing came from the 21st Independent Parachute Company, an unidentified group from the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade lodged nearby or even possibly German units, but the incident instantly dissolved the SS goodwill.65 One senior SS NCO called Colonel Marrable a ‘dirty swine’ before threatening to shoot him, and the potentially murderous situation was only eased slightly by an intercession from the SS medical officer and Lieutenant-Colonel Marrable coolly walking out into the rear parking area where the SS had come under fire.66
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