The epicentre of the 1st Border’s Saturday fight was at the extreme right of the Battalion’s frontage. The German attack on A Company’s sector of the perimeter began at 09:30, reportedly carried out by ‘Rumainian SS’ and again supported by Panzer Kompanie 224’s flame-thrower tanks. By midday the attackers had turned A Company’s northern flank with enemy tanks pushing deep into the Company’s positions and were threatening to overrun that entire section of the Divisional perimeter.92 Battalion HQ was made aware of the gravity of the situation via a calm and collected radio message from A Company HQ: ‘Flame throwing tank in the area, and shelling the company headquarters – all officers and N.C.O.s killed or wounded – What shall we do?’93 The message coincidentally arrived at Battalion HQ at the same time as Captain Barry Ingram, commander of the 1st Border’s Mortar Group, who was probably reporting that Lieutenant Michael Holman’s 23 Platoon was redeploying into the infantry role as its 3-inch mortars had all been put out of action by a combination of enemy action and lack of ammunition. Acting Battalion commander Major Stuart Cousens ordered Captain Ingram to clarify A Company’s situation, accompanied by his runner, a Private Gordon, and a party of ten men from A Company led by a Sergeant H. Burton; it is unclear if the latter were stragglers or had been deployed away from their parent Company. After passing through the 4th Parachute Squadron’s lines, Ingram approached A Company’s positions with Private Gordon in time to see an unaccompanied Flammpanzer B2 (f) knocked out by glider soldiers using grenades. He came upon A Company’s second-in-command Captain Charles Wilson, who was badly wounded by shrapnel before he could brief Ingram on the situation.94
A swift appreciation showed that A Company consisted of around sixty-five men from a variety of units including a Vickers MMG Section, equipped with two Bren guns and a PIAT with three rounds of ammunition. Captain Ingram swiftly organised this force to face a German infantry assault, holding fire until the inexperienced and bunched-up attackers were at point-blank range while crossing an open stretch of ground to the front of the Company HQ house. The result was reportedly a ‘massacre’, after which the glider soldiers collected two M34 machine-guns, a rifle, two pistols and a quantity of ammunition from the fallen enemy to augment their own almost depleted stock. On returning to Battalion HQ to report, Ingram was joined by Lieutenant Lennard Withers from the 2nd South Staffords accompanied by Sergeant Rogers with a 3-inch mortar with nine HE and three smoke rounds. Ingram appointed Withers his second-in-command and on returning to A Company lines had Sergeant Rogers drop two HE and a smoke bomb upon a thatched cottage he suspected was being employed as a German HQ; the smoke round set the roof on fire as intended and the Vickers Gun inflicted a number of casualties as the enemy evacuated the blazing building. In all, four separate German attacks were rebuffed over the course of the day, with All Ranks in A Company and beyond playing their part. A Lance-Corporal Steele addressed the Company’s lack of anti-tank grenades by venturing into no-man’s land alone to recover a supply container, while Acting Intelligence Officer Lieutenant Douglas Skilton and Company Sergeant Major Connett repeatedly carried ammunition to the fighting positions through continuous small-arms and artillery fire. Some of the ammunition thus distributed was brought up from the depleted Battalion HQ dump by Company Sergeant Major Leslie Fielding, who also witnessed the Vickers MMG team indulging in a collective ‘wee pee’ to fill their weapon’s barrel jacket owing to a lack of water; Fielding then assisted an unnamed sergeant in an unsuccessful attempt to mortar a dismounted German tank crew with a PIAT. For his part, in addition to moving between his new command’s fighting positions, Captain Ingram with Lieutenant Withers and two unnamed men put out a fire started by a mortar hit on some stored ammunition that threatened to spread to the trees surrounding the Company HQ house; he also ensured the transmission of hourly radio situation reports to Battalion HQ as well as tendering reports in person at least twice during the day.95
All did not go well between Captain Ingram and his acting Battalion commander. At some point Major Cousens instructed Ingram to pull A Company back to a new position closer to Battalion HQ. Ingram was not keen, not least because the new location was under constant German artillery fire, but he was badgered into agreeing with the caveat that the considerable number of wounded in the cellar of A Company HQ were evacuated to safety. He visited the Battalion RAP in person to arrange the evacuation. As we have seen, Medical Officer Captain John Graham-Jones had been unable to evacuate his casualties to the MDS through lack of serviceable Jeeps and because the MDS location had become the front line, and Ingram was thus greeted by ‘an evil smell of unwashed bodies, dirty dressings and foetid air’ in an RAP packed with wounded men. After accidentally treading on the Battalion Padre, Captain The Reverend John Rowell, Ingram located a sleeping Captain Graham-Jones, who was pummelled awake just long enough to inform Ingram that evacuating the A Company wounded to the RAP was ‘impossible’. On returning to Battalion HQ, Ingram therefore apologised to Major Cousens but declined to withdraw to the new location because that would involve abandoning A Company’s wounded to the Germans and would probably incur a large number of additional casualties in the process. He stuck to his decision even when threatened with a future court-martial, maintaining that Cousens’ order was unreasonable; the two officers ‘eventually parted on the worst of terms’.96
The very southern tip of the western perimeter was occupied by Lieutenant Smaczny and his party from the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade’s 8th Company. The Poles had been withdrawn from their reserve position on the Utrechtseweg at approximately 08:00, reportedly after accurate German mortar and artillery fire that wounded several of their number and rendered the ruined house they were occupying untenable. They were then despatched west by an unnamed Lieutenant-Colonel from the 1st Airlanding Brigade.97 The new position was adjacent to a large house called Transvalia and was intended to fill the gap between the Lower Rhine and BREESE Force and the 1st Border’s B Company positions in the woods, as well as blocking any German move along the Benedendorpsweg from Heveadorp. Despite constant small-arms, mortar and artillery fire, Lieutenant Smaczny had a daisy chain of No. 75 Hawkins Anti-Tank Grenades laid across the road and set his men to digging slit trenches in the grounds of the house.98 The neighbouring British units do not appear to have been impressed with their efforts: they reported the Poles losing around half their number to the barrage. According to 1st Airlanding Brigade HQ the losses were due to poor digging skills and battle inoculation, and the 1st Border’s semi-official account also refers to the Poles being reluctant to dig slit trenches.99
On investigating noises emanating from the Transvalia Lieutenant Smaczny discovered that the cellar was packed with British casualties being cared for by a Dutch woman, possibly the housekeeper, and her teenage daughter using whatever meagre means were to hand. The Polish officer promptly collected morphine syrettes from his party to aid the most seriously wounded while one of his men donated a large slab of beef cut from a convenient dead cow in lieu of rations; in return the woman gave Smaczny information on nearby German positions and later gave his men some beef stew left over after feeding the casualties. After an attempt to summon a doctor to assist the casualties they were evacuated to a safer location in the afternoon, presumably to the Division MDS, in a small convoy of medical Jeeps flying Red Cross flags. The Germans ceased fire while the Jeeps went about their business, and it took the convoy two round trips to remove all the casualties.100
By the time the casualty evacuation took place Lieutenant Smaczny’s little band had not only been under constant small-arms and artillery fire, but had also been menaced by German armoured vehicles. During the morning two unidentified vehicles, likely Char B tanks from Panzer Kompanie 224, approached the Transvalia along the Benedendorpsweg from Heveadorp. The Poles had nothing to counter the behemoths apart from a single PIAT, but the day was saved by the appearance of a 6-Pounder gun from the direction of the Oosterbeek Old Church, manhandled into a firing position
by its crew; the gun may have been the same piece belonging to the Polish Brigade’s Anti-Tank Battery that had spent Friday 22 September keeping back enemy infiltration near the gasworks, possibly commanded by a Corporal Pawalczyk. The gun scored a direct hit on the lead vehicle, damaging it and prompting both to make a hasty exit the way they had come, as did the 6-Pounder. Another Char B approached from the same direction an hour before the medical evacuation, standing off while a marksman picked off the No. 75 Mines stretched across the road with a rifle. Smaczny had left the mines unconcealed on the advice of a British officer, reportedly to allow future reinforcements to locate them easily, but the tank showed no inclination to close on the Polish position after dealing with the mines and presumably retired the way it had come.101 The Germans had also been maintaining the pressure with infantry, obliging Lieutenant Smaczny to withdraw an outpost on the Benedendorpsweg, and they also succeeded in establishing a machine-gun post between the Transvalia and the woods to the north, cutting the Poles’ link with the Border Regiment troops. Lieutenant Smaczny therefore despatched a fighting patrol via a circuitous route tasked to explain the situation to the 1st Border and then attack the German post from the north, while he led a diversionary attack from the Transvalia with a dozen men at 17:30 to draw the enemy post’s fire. The ruse worked and the fighting patrol overran the post from the rear, killing the occupants and capturing two machine-guns. Thereafter the night was relatively quiet apart from sporadic German mortar and artillery fire, and the Poles took the opportunity to work in the darkness, stealthily improving their positions and burying their dead.102
On the other side of the hill the 1st Border’s solid defence of the western face of the Divisional perimeter again had an impact beyond the battlefield level. Sturmbannführer Paul Helle, the commander of Bataillon Helle, had been relieved of his command for incompetence the previous day, and the Saturday fighting led to the commander of Panzer Kompanie 224, Leutnant Alfred May, being called before Generalleutnant von Tettau to explain the loss of six of his tanks, over a third of Panzer Kompanie 224’s strength, in the three-day period 20 to 22 September for no return.103 The interview revealed that one of the primary reasons for the losses was the failure of supporting infantry to protect the tanks from their opposite numbers, and confirmed von Tettau’s suspicion that all-arms inexperience was the root cause. He therefore ordered the implementation of a crash course in tank-infantry co-operation and the creation of dedicated tank protection units. In addition, May’s surviving tanks were forbidden to operate individually, and they were to operate only in support of SS Bataillonen Eberwein and Schulz, as those units contained a good proportion of combat-experienced troops.104
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The Saturday resupply drop came in, again in a single late-afternoon increment employing seventy-three Stirlings and fifty Dakotas that had originally been loaded for the previous day’s cancelled effort.105 The Squadrons from RAF No. 46 Group were first away, apart from Nos. 512 and 575 Squadrons based at RAF Broadwell. 575 Squadron temporarily relocated to Evere airfield near Brussels that day in line with an abortive scheme to have fighter aircraft deliver supplies suggested by the Group Commander, Air Commodore Lawrence Darvall, intended to reduce losses among the Dakotas. 512 Squadron spent the day transporting freight, also to Brussels.106 The first aircraft slated for the Oosterbeek resupply drop, seventeen Dakotas from No. 233 Squadron, began taking off from Blakehill Farm at 13:17 followed three minutes later by fifteen aircraft from the recently drafted-in No. 437 Squadron RCAF; next came eighteen Dakotas from Down Ampney beginning at 13:36, thirteen of them belonging to No. 48 Squadron and the remainder from No. 271 Squadron.107 The Stirlings from No. 38 Group began taking off first from RAF Keevil, led by thirteen machines from No. 196 Squadron at 14:00 followed by thirteen machines from No. 299 Squadron fifteen minutes later. This overlapped events at RAF Fairford, where eleven aircraft from No. 620 Squadron took off at 14:07 followed thirteen minutes later by eight machines from No. 190 Squadron. Last, albeit only by a few minutes, came the contingent from RAF Harwell with twenty-eight aircraft split evenly between Nos. 295 and 570 Squadrons commencing take-off from 14:32; the last machine lifted off at around 14:43. The entire process of putting the better part of 200 machines into the air from six different locations took approximately ninety minutes.108
The flight across the North Sea and up the Airborne Corridor appears to have been uneventful, although Flight-Lieutenant P. I. Burden’s Dakota from No. 233 Squadron aborted after turbulence from another aircraft caused a sudden drop in altitude that displaced its load.109 The flight enjoyed extensive fighter cover that extended right up to Oosterbeek; 1st Airlanding Brigade HQ reported ‘activity by our rocket-firing Typhoons’ while No. 1 Wing Glider Pilot HQ reported seeing Thunderbolts and Mustangs suppressing German flak with the understandably bitter rider that the ‘only time our fighter aircraft are seen in this area is when supplies are being dropped’.110 Details of the RAF effort are unclear, but the USAAF effort was huge, with a total of 586 P38, P47 and P51 fighter-bombers, largely from the US 8th Air Force, being deployed to strafe German flak and other positions in support of the resupply and reinforcement flights for all three Airborne divisions. They kept a reported 150 Luftwaffe fighters away from the vulnerable transports, claiming between twenty-seven and thirty-five Luftwaffe machines shot down in return for a loss of four P47s and ten P51s, with a further one of each type being damaged beyond repair; in addition, twenty-five P47s and ten P51s suffered lesser damage, with one pilot wounded in action and another ten posted missing.111 The fighter effort was noted by most units involved in the 1st Airborne Division resupply. No. 48 Squadron commented that ‘All crews were very glad and cheered to see good fighter cover’ and Nos. 233 and 437 Squadrons expressed similar sentiments, with the latter referring to friendly fighters dealing ‘promptly’ with German flak positions that revealed themselves west of the Drop Zone. In contrast No. 570 Squadron reported that ‘fighter support was again poor’; as the latter was one of the last away its aircraft may have arrived at Oosterbeek after the fighter-bombers had departed.112
No. 46 Group appears to have profited most from the flak suppression effort given that all aircraft from Nos. 233 and 271 Squadrons returned safely to base, though not entirely unscathed. Nine of No. 233 Squadron’s seventeen aircraft received varying degrees of damage whilst in the vicinity of Oosterbeek, the most serious being Warrant Officer K. G. Cranefield’s machine, which had a two-foot-diameter hole blown in its starboard wing. Cranefield was also seriously wounded in the knee and thigh but refused morphine in order to remain conscious for the landing at Blakehill Farm, as co-pilot Flight-Sergeant B. A. Stapleford was not fully qualified on the Dakota; Cranefield was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.113 Of No. 271 Squadron’s five-strong contingent only Flying Officer J. R. Nicoll’s machine received slight damage from light flak north of Drop Zone V, shrapnel from which also wounded one of the despatchers in the leg.114 Approximately half of No. 437 Squadron RCAF’s fifteen machines returned with light damage from small-arms fire and one, piloted by Flying Officer William Paget, was shot down and crashed south-west of Driel; Paget and his crew of three RCAF personnel were killed along with four RASC despatchers.115 Two of No. 48 Squadron’s aircraft also failed to return. One, flown by a Warrant Officer S. McLaughlin, was badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire but force-landed safely near Eindhoven. The other, flown by Pilot Officer Ralph Pring, was shot down near the Drop Zone possibly by a German fighter, given that a crew member in another aircraft reported seeing an FW 190 pursuing an unidentified Dakota. Flight-Sergeant Derek Gleave was the navigator on Pilot Officer Pring’s aircraft:
There were flames in the cockpit, and I was burnt on the hands and face. The pilot was absolutely marvellous. He saw this field and said ‘I’m going to land there.’ He must have been burned as well. I was struggling to open the escape hatch, which was right above me. I got it open all right but that caused a further rush of fire thro
ugh the cockpit area, although we were nearly on the ground by then…I was the first out, and the wireless operator [Warrant Officer James Springsteele RCAF] and second pilot [Sergeant Henry Colman RCAF] followed me. As far as I know, the pilot never got out; he may have been wounded by the flak.116
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