Measures were being undertaken to at least partially ameliorate the increasingly acute medical situation in the Oosterbeek perimeter, focussing on the Divisional MDS located in the Hotels Schoonoord and Vreewijk on the Stationsweg‒Utrechtseweg‒Pietersbergseweg crossroads. Kampfgruppe Möller’s advance west along the Utrechtseweg had put the MDS exactly on the front line, with both sides complaining that the other was taking illegal advantage of the situation. The SS were especially vociferous in this regard, and occupied the Hotel Schoonoord from early on Saturday afternoon until just after dark, although they did provide food and medical supplies as well as evacuating some of the most serious cases. By the night of 23-24 September the 1st Airborne Division’s senior medical officer, Assistant Director of Medical Services (ADMS) Colonel Graeme Warrack, had decided that ‘the battle could no longer continue in this fashion’, with medical facilities being caught up in the fighting despite displaying Red Cross flags; one location, possibly the CCS in the Hotel Tafelberg where Colonel Warrack had set up his HQ, was reportedly hit six separate times by artillery, one strike setting the building on fire and forcing the evacuation of 150 casualties.106 On the not unreasonable grounds that being a live prisoner of war was better than being a dead casualty, Colonel Warrack decided that the best solution was to come to an arrangement with the Germans that would allow the evacuation of the most serious cases for treatment at the German-run St Elizabeth Hospital in Arnhem, although this would require permission from the 1st Airborne Division’s commander. Warrack therefore presented his case to Major-General Urquhart at the Hotel Hartenstein at 09:30 on 24 September in what he described as ‘a long crack with the Commander…[that]…explained how unhealthy things were down our way’.107 After hearing Warrack out, Urquhart concurred and authorised him to approach the Germans but only on the strict proviso that on no account ‘must the enemy be allowed to think that this was a crack in the formation’s position…[and]…on condition that the Germans understand you are a doctor representing your patients – not an official emissary from the division’.108 Warrack promptly sought out two men to accompany him, Dr. Gerrit van Maanen, a Dutch civilian doctor working in the Hotel Tafelberg, and the Dutch military liaison officer assigned to the 1st Airborne Division, Lieutenant-Commander Arnoldus Wolters, to act as an interpreter; in order to conceal his potentially extremely dangerous status, Wolters assumed the identity of a fictitious Canadian officer named Johnson.109
The three men began by calling into the Hotel Schoonoord to allow Colonel Warrack to contact his opposite number from 9 SS Panzer Division, Hauptsturmführer Dr Egon Skalka, who had been instrumental in the evacuation of serious casualties from the MDS the previous day; Skalka was also running the St Elizabeth Hospital on the outskirts of Arnhem as a joint facility, employing its original British medical staff from 16 Parachute Field Ambulance RAMC and medical supplies gathered from British resupply drops.110 Hauptsturmführer Skalka not only agreed to approach his Division commander, but also magnanimously offered to drive Warrack and Wolters to meet him in person using a captured Airborne Jeep. He refused to allow Dr van Maanen to accompany them, presumably because he was a civilian. As 9 SS Panzer Division HQ was located in a commandeered school on the Hezelbergheweg in Arnhem, the journey involved traversing not only the scene of the recent fighting on the east face of the Oosterbeek pocket but also the detritus and destruction from the 1st Parachute Brigade’s epic but abortive fight to reach the Arnhem road bridge; Lieutenant-Commander Wolters found the sight ‘sad and miserable’, although he and Warrack were likely more immediately concerned with Skalka’s aggressive driving style. On arrival Skalka was obliged to reassure an angry Obersturmbannführer Walther Harzer that his roundabout route and speedy driving had obviated the need to blindfold the emissaries before he and Harzer sat down to talk with the Airborne officers, with Warrack introducing Wolters as the Canadian Johnson. The character of what followed differs between accounts, with Harzer describing the discussion as mutually conciliatory in tone. He said he agreed to Warrack’s proposal and a truce for it to be carried out. However, according to Wolters, Harzer initially ‘refused to even consider a truce’ and after some discussion with chief-of-staff Hauptsturmführer Wilfried Schwarz and other senior members of the Division staff, it was decided to present the matter to higher authority. The emissaries were left with a plate of meat and onion sandwiches and a bottle of brandy, which Warrack ordered Wolters not to imbibe on an empty stomach; the sandwiches were the first proper food either of the Airborne officers had tasted for some time.
Higher authority was the commander of II SS Panzerkorps, Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Bittrich, who happened to be present at Harzer’s HQ. Entering hatless in his trademark long leather coat, trailed by Harzer and his staff amidst a flurry of salutes, Bittrich greeted the Airborne emissaries by quietly expressing regret that Britain and Germany were at war. He then listened in silence to Warrack’s proposal before giving his consent for the truce and evacuation. The agreement was thus reached in a matter of minutes by around 10:30, only an hour or so after Warrack had initially broached the matter with Major-General Urquhart; Bittrich also handed Warrack a bottle of brandy to pass on to his Division commander with his compliments, before leaving as swiftly as he had arrived. Hauptsturmführer Dr Skalka promptly set about rounding up vehicles to carry out the evacuation, leaving Warrack and Wolters to be escorted back to British lines by another SS medical officer in the same Jeep, now decorated with a large Red Cross flag; Skalka also generously allowed the Airborne officers to fill their pockets with captured British morphine ampoules and other medical supplies before leaving. The departure from the SS HQ was greeted with extra relief by Wolters, as at one point during the discussions Hauptsturmführer Schwarz had pointedly commented that he did not ‘speak German like a Britisher’. The SS escort also allowed a detour on the way back to British lines to allow Warrack to visit the St Elizabeth Hospital where he was greeted by surgeons Major Cedric Longland and Captain Alexander Lipmann-Kessel from 16 Parachute Field Ambulance RAMC, and the senior Dutch civilian surgeon Dr. Van Hengel. They were all anxious for news on the progress of the battle; Warrack obliged before warning the surgeons to expect an increase in the flow of casualties when the evacuation of the Division MDS commenced later in the day. He then returned to his HQ in the Hotel Tafelberg to be greeted by ‘a packet of mortaring’.111
The truce was arranged to begin at 15:00 although Colonel Warrack does not appear to have informed Division HQ of the arrangement until the evacuation had been underway for almost two hours, assuming it did begin at 15:00, as the sources are unclear.112 Nor does he appear to have informed the Airborne units immediately adjacent to the MDS, although the beginning of the truce was marked by a cessation of the German bombardment. Surgeon Captain Stuart Mawson referred to the sudden ‘exaggerated silence’ against which ‘the call of birds could be heard taking their rightful place in the scheme of things on a sunny September morning.’113 On the north side of the Utrechtseweg‒Stationsweg crossroads the Poles fired on any German who exposed himself in the vicinity of the MDS, including an NCO who was rash enough to point his weapon toward the Polish positions while standing next to an ambulance. This continued until Lieutenant-Colonel Marrable crossed to the Quatre Bras and took 2nd Lieutenant Kowalczyk to task, which was reportedly the first the Poles had heard of any local ceasefire; Kowalczyk duly passed word to acting Battalion commander 2nd Lieutenant Bereda-Fialkowski, who immediately forbade any more firing toward the MDS.114
For their part the Germans appear to have used the truce to continue their effort to extend control over the area around the MDS, and there was an armed German presence inside the medical facility from at least the early morning. According to the Division War Diary, an unnamed BBC correspondent who left one of the MDS buildings to fetch water for the wounded under a Red Cross flag returned to find around 150 armed German troops in the hospital; the correspondent was presumably either Guy Byam or Stanley Maxsted, the two BBC
members of the ten-strong press team attached to the 1st Airborne Division.115 The Polish semi-official account refers to German troops occupying a temporary ward upstairs in the Hotel Schoonoord and drawing fire from the nearby Poles when they set up a machine-gun in one of the windows. The situation was reportedly resolved by an unnamed British doctor who manhandled the weapon away from the window and ordered the SS to leave the ward forthwith; it is unclear if they complied.116
On the south side of the Utrechtseweg the 21st Independent Company reported the arrival of two Panzer IVs in front of No. 3 Platoon’s positions on the Pietersbergseweg followed shortly afterward by a message to Major Wilson, delivered via an unnamed British medical officer from the CCS in the Hotel Tafelberg. The demand was simple: the Pathfinders were to abandon one of the houses they occupied or the tanks would blast them out. Major Wilson informed Division HQ of the development at 15:27, although somehow the message became a threat to shell the CCS in the Hotel Tafelberg rather than the 21st Independent’s position; the message nonetheless prompted a ‘stand fast’ order from Major-General Urquhart.117 Wilson responded to the Germans with his customary bellicosity by agreeing to abandon the house provided the Germans reciprocated by withdrawing all their troops from the immediate vicinity of the MDS, pulled their tanks back for a mile and refrained from further activity until the casualty evacuation from the MDS was complete; failure to comply would prompt the Pathfinders to hold onto the disputed house and destroy the two tanks. To back this up, Wilson despatched a Private Dixon, the Army Catering Corps cook attached to No. 3 Platoon, to stalk the tanks with a PIAT. Dixon scored a direct hit on one of the vehicles, detonating its ammunition and igniting a fire that lasted for several hours; the second tank then decided discretion was the better part of valour and withdrew whence it had come.118 Despite this, Major Wilson ‘agreed locally’ to evacuate one of his houses in return for the Germans withdrawing a StuG from a crossroads adjacent to the MDS at around 19:00.119
In the meantime the evacuation of casualties from the hotels Schoonoord and Vreewijk was going ahead as arranged. The arrival of Hauptsturmführer Dr Skalka’s six vehicles, each capable of carrying four stretcher cases each, was witnessed by a rather unimpressed Captain Mawson:
The ambulances scarcely deserved the name, being a hotch-potch of battered commercial vehicles distinguished only by large Red Crosses on their sides and tops. They wound their way jerkily along the torn-up road, following a serpentine and unpredictable route to avoid the holes, and fetched up in an untidy line outside the Schoonoord, having first advanced to the crossroad where they performed a wide, sweeping turn to bring them back facing the way they had come.
Lieutenant-Colonel Marrable described the commandeered German fleet as ‘ramshackle boneshakers…hardly fit to carry a healthy man let alone a sick and wounded one’, but also correctly surmised that the vehicles were likely all the Germans had been able to scrape together.120 After a brief discussion between Colonel Marrable and Hauptsturmführer Dr Skalka the process of carrying the stretcher-bound wounded through the hotel’s main entrance to the waiting vehicles began; all of them were loaded and driven as a convoy, making an undetermined number of round trips over the course of the truce. The process of checking the casualties off the hospital roll and despatching them out to the waiting transport was supervised by Colonel Marrable in person from the entranceway, in part to deter armed German troops from entering the MDS.
The most serious cases were moved first, including Brigadier Hackett, who was optimistically masquerading as a corporal to increase his future chances of escape. On arrival at the St Elizabeth Hospital Hackett was triaged by an SS surgeon who, based upon a superficial examination consisting of poking the stretchered casualty with his foot, assessed him as not worth treating. He was nonetheless examined by Captain Alexander Lippmann-Kessel from 16 Parachute Field Ambulance, and when he was unable to locate any exit wounds the SS surgeon again opined that stomach and head wounds should be given an injection and left to die; both exchanges were noted by the fully conscious Hackett, who spoke German.121 In the event Captain Lippmann-Kessel ignored his opposite number’s advice and went on to remove several mortar bomb splinters from Hackett’s stomach and sealed fourteen perforations in his lower intestine, thereby saving his life.122 Back at the Hotel Schoonoord, Colonel Marrable surreptitiously initiated a deliberate slowing of the evacuation process when the most urgent cases had been evacuated in a covert effort to keep the less seriously wounded casualties in the MDS so they could be liberated by 30 Corps when it finally pushed across the Lower Rhine. Captain Clifford Simmons from 181 Parachute Field Ambulance dubbed the process ‘Operation Dilly-Dally’ and explained to Mawson that the idea was to ‘make everything take twice as long as usual; twice as long to get the Germans’ meaning if they tell you something, twice as long to lift a stretcher, twice as long to carry it, twice as long to put it down. Bandages must fall off and any other damn thing you can think of tried on.’123 It is unclear how many casualties were eventually evacuated by the Germans, or how many were successfully held back at the MDS by the go-slow effort.
Despite the trials and tribulations involved in serving in the MDS Captain Mawson saw the evacuation of the patients as the ‘dissolution of the cement that bound us all together’ and he decided it was time to rejoin his parent unit, the 11th Parachute Battalion; his decision was likely also prompted at least in part by Captain Simmons pointing out that the Germans were likely to co-opt the MDS medical staff, as they had at the St Elizabeth hospital. Mawson thus sounded out a Sergeant Dwyer and Private Adams from the 11th Battalion who were also serving in the Hotel Schoonoord before approaching Colonel Marrable for permission, although Dwyer announced that he had already raised the matter with Adams and would be departing that night whether Marrable agreed or not. However, Mawson was side tracked by fruitlessly trying to persuade the Dutch nurse who had improvised the Red Cross flag for his foray to the 21st Independent Company the previous evening to leave the MDS. She refused to leave unless Mawson and his companions accompanied her into hiding. Mawson was then buttonholed by Colonel Marrable who asked for time to think about the request. Mawson went ahead with preparations with Dwyer and Adams in the meantime, but approaching Marrable again proved to be his undoing as the latter was in the middle of a discussion via interpreter with Hauptsturmführer Dr Skalka, whom Mawson had literally bumped into a little earlier. Skalka was asking Marrable to provide a German-speaking doctor to assist with the evacuated casualties, who were reportedly resisting German attempts to assist them owing to the language barrier. Disregarding Marrable’s insistence that he had no suitable personnel available, Skalka spotted Mawson standing to one side, clapped him on the shoulder and, recalling their conversation in French the previous day, announced that he would come and help. After retrieving his Denison smock, webbing and maroon beret from the escape cache with Sergeant Dwyer’s assistance, Captain Mawson joined Skalka in the back seat of his staff car, where the German officer greeted his new assistant with the immortal words ‘Ah well, my friend. Now, for you the war is finished, would you like a cigarette?’ It is unclear if Sergeant Dwyer and Private Adams were successful in leaving the MDS but they do not appear to have escaped from the wider Oosterbeek perimeter, given that Mawson saw both men working in a German medical facility set up in a barracks near Apeldoorn shortly after the battle. Mawson ended the war serving as a Medical Officer at a satellite POW labour camp administered from Stalag IV G at Oschatz near Dresden in eastern Germany.124
The sector to the immediate south of the Hotels Schoonoord and Vreewijk was held by Captain John Cranmer-Byng and two parachute platoons from 250 (Airborne) Light Composite Company RASC, backed by Glider Pilots from Major Robert Croot’s G Squadron protecting the northern aspect of the 1st Airlanding Light Regiment’s gun positions around the Oosterbeek Old Church as part of LONSDALE Force. The RASC Company may therefore have been forced back or overrun, given that the 1st Parachute Battalion also serving wit
h LONSDALE Force to the south reported German tanks breaking through into a sector to their north.125 For its part LONSDALE Force continued to hold the south-eastern sector of the perimeter shielding the 1st Airlanding Light Regiment’s gun positions, and more importantly preventing Kampfgruppe Harder from advancing along the riverside Benedendorpsweg and pinching the 1st Airborne Division’s perimeter away from the Lower Rhine. The unit War Diaries of the various units involved all tell a similar story of intense and incessant mortar and artillery fire covering German attacks with infantry and armoured vehicles. The 11th Parachute Battalion reportedly spent the day clearing snipers that had infiltrated into the area north of the Oosterbeek Old Church, while the 2nd South Staffords operating near the Laundry had the satisfaction of watching while the Light Regiment’s guns ‘…smashed up a German MG post in the roof of a house 300 yds away up the road towards STATION OOSTERBEEK’, presumably referring to the Weverstraat running north from the Benedendorpsweg.126 The 1st Parachute Battalion reported coming under increasingly heavy fire from German tanks and self-propelled guns that had broken through to the north of its positions along with infiltration by snipers from the same source, and to despatching Lieutenant Albert Turrell to take command of the 3rd Parachute Battalion contingent at 14:00 after it lost its last officer. The last 3rd Battalion officer, Lieutenant James Cleminson, had been wounded and evacuated the previous day, after which command may have devolved to Lieutenant Philip Evans from the 2nd South Staffords’ C Company; Evans was wounded and evacuated in turn at some point before 14:00.127
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