16
Nijmegen and Eindhoven Tuesday 19 September
After all the delays to XXX Corps, the 14th Field Squadron Royal Engineers worked through the night at Son. They excelled themselves by assembling a Bailey bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal in less than eight hours, and by 06.15 on Tuesday the armoured cars of the Household Cavalry were rattling across it. Making up for lost time, they were over the River Aa and through Veghel half an hour later. The Grenadier Group had taken over the lead from the Irish Guards and they drove steadily all morning on towards the bridge over the River Maas at Grave. ‘No sign of enemy, save prisoners,’ the Irish Guards noted in their war diary.
As the huge snake of XXX Corps followed, a squadron of Cromwell tanks from the 15th/19th Hussars was diverted to support the embattled 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment at Best. In the two battalions dug in on the edge of the Sonsche forest, nobody yet knew that Wierzbowski’s platoon was still resisting at dawn by the blown bridge little more than a kilometre further on. Wierzbowski hoped that the message about their plight, sent via the Household Cavalry armoured car, would lead to their deliverance.
The remnants of Wierzbowski’s little force were now on their own because Mottola’s platoon, dug in on their left, had disintegrated and disappeared during the night. Wierzbowski and his men were so exhausted that they could hardly stay awake, but they knew they could not abandon their wounded comrades.
Dawn revealed a heavy mist over the canal. Suddenly figures loomed out of the haze on all sides. Wierzbowski shouted a warning, but the Germans had thrown their potato-masher grenades first. Some men were quick enough to throw them back out of their trenches before they exploded, but one blew up in a paratrooper’s face, blinding him completely. Another fell in the trench next to Wierzbowski and just behind Pfc Mann who was ‘propped against the back of the trench, and who had both arms wrapped in slings from his previous wounds’. Mann yelled ‘Grenade!’ and Wierzbowski saw him ‘deliberately slide his back on the grenade, covering it’. The grenade went off, muffled by his sacrifice. Wierzbowski caught him by the shoulders. Mann looked up at him and said, ‘Lieutenant, my back’s gone.’ Without another sound, he closed his eyes. Wierzbowski and two others in the trench were only slightly wounded as a result. Mann was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
Soon Wierzbowski’s platoon had fired their last rounds. They had no option but to surrender. Two German medics, whom they had captured earlier, jumped up to beg their comrades not to kill anyone. Wierzbowski and half a dozen survivors were taken back to a German field hospital. Some time later, the Germans became very agitated when a thunderous vibration began. The tanks of the Guards Armoured Division were approaching. Wierzbowski, working through one of his men who spoke German, persuaded the major in charge to lay down their weapons, which the Americans promptly seized. Their return next day to the 502nd caused astonishment, for everyone had assumed they were dead.
The rapid advance of the Guards Armoured Division against negligible opposition caused a good deal of false optimism. ‘It was an express drive right across Holland,’ Frank Gillard reported for the BBC, ‘linking up all the way with parachutists and airborne forces who prepared the ground and made the advance possible by seizing the bridges and road junctions. In five hours, five hours only – an advance of almost thirty miles had been made . . . It’s an incredible achievement.’
On hearing that the Guards Armoured Division had reached the Grave bridge, Browning told Colonel Chatterton to drive down with him to meet them and Brigadier General Gavin at Overasselt. Browning, although outwardly calm, was deeply concerned at the lack of contact with the 1st Airborne at Arnhem. The congratulations he had received in a signal from Montgomery were turning bitter, but he could not admit it. A strange rumour had also emerged back in Britain. Browning’s wife, the novelist Daphne du Maurier, was rung at three in the morning by a journalist ‘asking if it were true that my husband had been taken prisoner’.
Browning failed to recognize the Grenadier officer who greeted him, because his face was caked with the dust and dirt thrown up by the armoured vehicles. ‘General “Boy” Browning,’ he wrote, ‘accompanied by an escort of very tough looking glider pilots, was as ever immaculately dressed, a contrast to our filthy appearance.’ Gavin exulted at the sight of the tanks. ‘I was really living,’ he said later. The 82nd Airborne’s isolation was over and with the tanks of the Guards Armoured Division he was now confident that they could both seize the Nijmegen bridge and fight off any attack from the Reichswald.
Gavin and Browning met Major General Allan Adair, the commander of the Guards Armoured Division, who was taken aback to hear that the Americans had not already captured the bridge. He had assumed that it had been the 82nd Airborne’s first priority and that his tanks would simply ‘sweep through’ the city and on to Arnhem. Gavin, who had been keeping his best battalion in reserve, now proposed that it should ride the Sherman tanks of the Grenadier Guards and charge the bridge along with their infantry battalion. In return he asked for a battalion of the Coldstream to replace it on the Groesbeek sector. All the British officers agreed, unaware of the Frundsberg reinforcements which had reached northern Nijmegen. In fact it was ‘suggested that the town was not strongly held and that a display of force in the shape of tanks would probably cause the enemy to withdraw’.
The Grenadier Guards group, with Captain the Duke of Rutland commanding the lead motor company and Major Alec Gregory Hood the armoured squadron, had meanwhile been diverted east via Groesbeek. A party of Royal Engineers, after checking bridges, had decided that only the span at Heuman was sufficiently robust to bear tanks.
The Grenadiers had been told to meet Captain Bestebreurtje at the Convent of Marienboom five kilometres south of Nijmegen. They parked their tanks outside, but then came under air attack. Lieutenant Colonel Rodney Moore, whose aircraft-recognition skills were notoriously bad, became convinced that the plane attacking them was an Allied fighter. He started throwing yellow smoke grenades to identify themselves. This rather blinded his own adjutant, Captain Tony Heywood, who was frantically firing the Sherman’s turret-mounted machine gun at the strafing Messerschmitt.
Once the aircraft had departed, Bestebreurtje led the officers over to the Hotel Sionshof. Word had spread of the meeting, and almost every member of the different underground groups converged on the place, causing chaos. Major Henry Stanley of the Grenadiers described the scene. ‘It was a lovely sunny day and the café had already attracted the attention of the crowds. Groups of excited civilians were pushing their way in and talking to anyone prepared to listen. The underground supporters were being marshalled together in one room by the Dutch liaison officer all talking at once. Dutch guards, obviously impressed by the importance of the occasion, were ineffectively trying to prevent anyone coming in or out. Outside, a battery of American 75s were firing away as hard as they could, and as our tanks began to arrive still more excited and delighted spectators joined the crowds. Meanwhile inside the café the owners were doing a record business. In the midst of all this we were trying to evolve a plan to capture two bridges over one of the largest rivers in Europe.’
Gavin and his most trusted battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin H. Vandervoort, also arrived and the plan was rapidly agreed. Members of the Dutch underground insisted that the plunger to blow the main bridge was in the post office building held by the Germans. Gavin promised an extra platoon of his paratroopers to help take the place. He went out and grabbed the first platoon he came across. Bestebreurtje had meanwhile selected four members of the underground to act as guides for the three combat teams and the post office group.*
Gavin left to meet General Horrocks, accompanied by Adair, in a schoolhouse near Malden. Gavin told Horrocks that he wanted boats to launch an attack on the northern end of the bridge in case they did not manage to seize it that evening. Horrocks agreed and Adair said that he could bring up about twenty-eight assault boats that night. Thus contrary to the belief of many at the time, the plan to launch an opposed crossing of the Waal was entirely Gavin’s.
The Grenadiers mounted their tanks and began the advance into Nijmegen. Part of Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion of the 505th Parachute Infantry rode on the engine decks, and the rest ran from tree to tree on the flanks up the broad avenue of the Groesbeekseweg. According to an American source, as the Grenadiers advanced towards the huge traffic circle of the Keizer Karelplein, the column came to a halt. The sharp crack of 88s firing could be heard, and tracer was flying overhead down the street. Captain Robert Franco, the surgeon of the 2nd Battalion, decided to leave his Jeep and walk ahead with an aid man to see what was happening. ‘Captain Franco, look!’ his aid man suddenly called out, pointing. ‘The source of wonderment was a pair of tankers in their black berets, sitting in the middle of the street, making tea over the usual square oil can half-filled with sand and drenched with gasoline. I looked at my watch. It was 4 p.m.’ Even allowing for soldiers’ tales, there are too many similar accounts to dismiss them. Major Dick Winters of the 101st Airborne recounted that ‘the British custom of wanting – insisting – on stopping to “brew up a cup of tea” left us speechless.’ He concluded that the British, with the exception of their airborne units, were ‘not aggressive’.
The Grenadier Group consisted of the 1st Motor Battalion and the 2nd (Armoured) Battalion, now reinforced by Vandervoort’s battalion. A battery of the 153rd Field Regiment and Q Battery of the 21st Anti-Tank Regiment also supported it. While the British and American guns hammered away at the north end of the great road bridge, the two main attacking columns advanced into the city. One headed for the railway bridge and the other for the road bridge, but they came up against heavy resistance at the Keizer Karelplein. German 88mm guns, well dug in, were shielded by blazing buildings. Fire-raising groups increased the destruction begun the day before, and German artillery north of the River Waal was also firing into the city.
The only group to enjoy any success at this attempt was the smallest one. Captain George Thorne, commanding a troop of Shermans, a platoon of Grenadiers and a platoon of paratroopers, headed for the post office ‘where it was rumoured a horrible little man was sitting with a plunger, waiting to blow the bridge by remote control’. As they entered the southern part of Nijmegen, people emerged from their houses to wave and welcome them. According to Major Stanley, ‘the guide who was with them showed a remarkable capacity for receiving the admiration of the crowd until the first shot was fired, whereupon he subsided to the bottom of the tank and refused to stir an inch. Finally he was hoisted up by the scruff of the neck and forcibly asked the whereabouts of the Post Office. He gazed around and then pointed to the building alongside which the tank had pulled up. The Post Office was stormed and taken, but no horrible little man was found.’ The Grenadiers were rightly sceptical of the whole story, since the logical place for any detonating device would be on the north bank of the River Waal, not in the town. But although the Germans inside the post office surrendered immediately, eight Guardsmen were killed by a shell, fired from across the river, which exploded in the front of the building.
Some SS soldiers, including an Obersturmführer, were captured, totally drunk, in business premises on Van Welderenstraat. They were taken back to the post office to join the other prisoners. The Obersturmführer, finding that Gerardus Groothuijsse was a member of the underground and now with the Guardsmen, told him that when the Germans recaptured the city he and all his fellow terrorists would be shot. A Grenadier hauled the Obersturmführer off, shot him and took his watch which he proudly offered back to Groothuijsse as a ‘nice souvenir’.
From the post office, Thorne’s force advanced towards the Keizer Lodewijkplein, a smaller traffic circle close to the south end of the road bridge. But with the open area of Hunner Park in front they came into plain view of the 88mm guns and had to beat a rapid retreat, suffering more casualties. The German defence system ahead was formidable. To the west of the bridge on the edge of the escarpment stood the Valkhof, the Carolingian citadel, and the Belvedere, a sixteenth-century watchtower high above the Waal. And the Kampfgruppe Reinhold, including the Euling Battalion of SS panzergrenadiers, reinforced by a mixed group under Major Bodo Ahlborn, had wasted no time since their arrival in digging foxholes and slit trenches. The bridge approach was also blocked by wrecked vehicles.
‘The town was on fire,’ one of Vandervoort’s officers reported, ‘and the flames silhouetted the British tanks so they were good targets for the German 88s. The tanks had to pull out. I was trapped there by the bridge. I had two platoons reinforced with 15 British Tommies. The Germans attempted to flank us. We gathered up our wounded, six American and British soldiers, and we carried them through a burning apartment building, and to the back yard.’ They found it had a three-metre wall, so it was hard work passing the wounded over the top. German soldiers had also been spotted digging defences on the north bank of the Waal, so some of Vandervoort’s paratroopers went up on to the rooftops opposite and picked them off as they dug.
Even if the sally to the bridges failed, the arrival of the Grenadiers’ tanks in Nijmegen seems to have saved a number of people. A party of German soldiers was chasing a policeman working with the underground, who had tried to steal a German truck full of ammunition. He fled through the air-raid precaution headquarters and out of a back door. The Germans charged in and levelled their rifles at everyone working there. All the staff, nearly forty strong, had to stand with their hands above their heads as the German officer ranted that fresh German troops were arriving from all sides. ‘The town is surrounded!’ he shouted. He claimed that he and his men had been shot at it from this building. ‘We’re burning the whole town to the ground.’ At that moment, one of the men with his hands up asked if he could stub out his cigarette as it was about to burn his fingers. This provoked an explosion of nervous laughter from the others, which did not improve the Germans’ mood. The officer said that he would hand them all over to the Gestapo, but then the rolling thunder of approaching tanks made the Germans flee for their lives. ‘It is only when one faces death’, observed one of the men there, ‘that one realises the great value of life.’
This sentiment was reflected in much of the population. People showed a remarkable resignation when forced to abandon their houses and possessions to the flames. They were simply thankful that they and their family were at least still alive as they fled through showers of sparks from the burning buildings. Of course, a number broke down under the strain and horror of what they had seen. After the fires set by German soldiers and the teenagers of the Reichsarbeitsdienst the evening before, most families had prepared ‘flight cases’ with essentials and valuables ready for a rapid departure.
A diarist described their whole street burning, the blaze started by the Germans, the occupants having to escape over garden walls. ‘Some Germans throw hand-grenades behind them,’ he wrote, but ‘one soldier helps to lift children and suitcases over the walls.’ One group of Germans even apologized to the inhabitants of the house they were about to set ablaze. ‘We are very sorry but we have to set light to it.’ In another of the houses, a drunken German soldier continued to play the piano. Just south of their Valkhof defences the SS were having a wild party, throwing beer bottles. A couple of them apparently danced with wooden mannequins seized from smashed shop windows. Fleeing inhabitants gave them a wide berth, fearing what they might do in their madness.
A woman described how German youths from the RAD and the SS, some of them very drunk, went shouting and screaming through the streets: ‘they shot left and right, and doused houses in petrol . . . They torched our whole city.’ Another wrote, ‘We hear that a middle aged couple have been driven back into the flames by those bastards! Their name was Frederiks and they were people whose son had been executed the year before during the strikes in 1943. He had been caught distributing leaflets.’
The fighting amid the blazing buildings became savage that night. A lieutenant in Vandervoort’s battalion described it as ‘a fierce hand-to-hand battle in which trench knives were the only weapons used’. He added that ‘the ceaseless hunt for snipers made psycho cases out of us.’ The director of the concert hall described the fighting around the Keizer Karelplein, where the Germans had started so many fires. ‘The racket of guns, mortars and machine guns was terrible.’
Most of the buildings around the Keizer Karelplein were ablaze, including the university building, the courthouse and the houses near the St Josephkerk. Smoke made the air almost unbreathable. ‘As evening falls over the town, the air is coloured red from the countless fires.’ Many similar images of Nijmegen burning were recorded. ‘The centre of the town looks like hell. A red glow hangs against the black sky. The crackling of the fires can be heard from afar.’ An increasing number of the population began to flee the town in fearful despair.
SS-Brigadeführer Harmel of the Frundsberg refused to acknowledge after the war that the fires had been started deliberately by his own men, and tried to argue that it was simply an unfortunate consequence of battle. ‘After the violent street fighting, the whole of the north part of Nijmegen was seen to be on fire.’ At 21.30 that evening Harmel’s superior Obergruppenführer Bittrich signalled to Model’s headquarters, ‘Commanding general II SS Panzer Corps emphasizes that the Nijmegen garrison is very weak.’ To conceal comparative weakness with extreme violence was a standard SS response.
Allied commanders at Nijmegen soon saw that their frontal attack on the bridges would fail. Different methods were needed. They would have to clear the town, sector by sector, and Gavin’s idea of an assault crossing of the River Waal became essential.
Gavin had suddenly appeared at the command post of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. According to Captain Louis A. Hauptfleisch, Colonel Reuben Tucker’s regimental adjutant, Gavin had been very apologetic about the plan for a river assault in broad daylight. Hauptfleisch assumed that the order had come from General Browning, when the idea was entirely Gavin’s. Tucker was stoical. ‘OK, we will do the best we can,’ was his response. He told Hauptfleisch to summon the three battalion commanders for an orders group to be held on his return from the conference at Gavin’s headquarters in the forest near Berg en Dal.
Browning, accompanied by Colonel George Chatterton of the Glider Pilot Regiment, was there along with senior officers from XXX Corps. Chatterton described a Guards brigadier (probably Gwatkin), wearing corduroys and suede desert boots, sitting on a shooting stick. Reuben Tucker wore a helmet, had a hefty pistol strapped under his left armpit, and a trench knife on his belt. Tucker was chewing a cigar ‘and occasionally he would remove it long enough to spit. Every time he did, I could see looks of faint surprise flicker over the faces of the Guards officers.’
The plan was that once the town had been secured, Tucker’s 3rd Battalion, under cover of a smokescreen and with supporting fire from the Shermans of the 2nd (Armoured) Battalion of the Irish Guards, would paddle across the Waal well to the west of the road and rail bridges. They would then swing right along the bank of the river and, as soon as they reached the north end of the road bridge, the tanks of the Grenadiers would charge across. It sounded quite straightforward.
The 3rd Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment was commanded by Major Julian Cook. He briefed his officers that night on the 1st Airborne’s situation, and the need to cross the Waal to capture the Nijmegen bridge. His officers were rather shaken to hear that things were not going well in Arnhem. A shot went off during the briefing. Private Gittman, who had been cleaning Captain T. Moffat Burriss’s pistol for him, had fired it accidentally, forgetting there was a round in the chamber. The bullet went through his hand. As soon as his comrades heard of their mission the next day, they teased Gittman with the suggestion that he had done it deliberately to avoid the mission. Gittman, furious at any suggestion of a self-inflicted wound, was determined to join them the next day, even heavily bandaged.
Brigadier General Gavin’s surge of confidence, prompted by the arrival of the Guards Armoured Division, would not last long. That night a German counter-attack on the 508th sector by the hill in the Den Heuvel woods was beaten back with help from the armoured battalion of the Coldstream Guards. But the next morning the tanks had to move south rapidly, as a far more dangerous situation developed near Mook, putting the vital bridge at Heumel under threat. German attacks in preparation, up and down the XXX Corps lifeline, would threaten the whole operation. Horrocks’s cosy term the ‘Club Route’ was rapidly forgotten. The American name of ‘Hell’s Highway’ was far more descriptive.
St Oedenrode, which the Guards Armoured Division had passed through that morning, was also under attack. Fortunately for Colonel Cassidy and the 1st Battalion of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, one of the Irish Guards Shermans had suffered mechanical problems in the small town and remained behind for repairs to the engine. When Company C reported that Germans were approaching the town, Captain James J. Hatch ran over to the tank, commanded by Sergeant Paddy McCrory, to ask if he could help. ‘Hell, yes!’ came the reply. Capable of no more than five miles an hour, the tank clanked up another road to strengthen the defence. McCrory advanced with his head out of the turret, despite the hail of bullets. Then, spotting a track off to the left, he followed it. After about 200 metres he suddenly saw a battery of three German light flak 20mm guns ahead which were firing at Company C. They were concentrating so much on their work that they did not see the tank until McCrory’s gunner opened fire, putting them out of action. McCrory pushed on across to the Schijndel road. An American paratrooper helping out in the tank spotted a camouflaged gun ahead. He yelled at McCrory, and the turret traversed on to the target. A few moments later the gunner also hit a German truck which, to judge by the explosion, turned out to be full of ammunition. Some thirty German dead were counted and fifty-three prisoners taken.
When Colonel Cassidy thanked Paddy McCrory for his contribution afterwards, saying that his tank had changed the whole course of the engagement, the Irish Guards sergeant replied simply, ‘When in doubt, lash out.’ Cassidy decided to make it his motto too. His men would have little rest. Another advance on St Oedenrode took place that afternoon, as Model’s headquarters reported: ‘16.00, counter-attack by 59th Infanterie-Division slowly winning ground on western edges Oedenrode.’
British tanks made a vital contribution to a much larger battle further south at Best. Here the other two battalions of the 502nd were launching a counter-attack by the Sonsche forest, supported by two battalions of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment. One report also mentions the presence of nearly a hundred armed members of the Dutch underground group PAN.
The squadron of the 15th/19th Hussars in Cromwell tanks was greeted enthusiastically by the paratroopers. Their squadron leader asked the Americans to stand back as they lined up on the edge of the forest. The Cromwells opened fire together and maintained a rapid rate of reloading. ‘The tanks turned the tide of battle,’ Lieutenant John L. Cronin reported. ‘The Germans saw the tanks and they started to wave handkerchiefs and white paper. Some of the bitter-end chaps shot the Germans who were offering to surrender.’ German officers appear to have ordered machine-gunners to shoot them down.
‘Our men wanted to kill off the Germans,’ Cronin continued, ‘but the battalion [commanding officer] said we must take prisoner every German who wanted to surrender. Then we saw them standing there, cowering before our weapons. They looked like broken men. Even the kids looked broken. They were asked why they had not surrendered sooner. “Officers wouldn’t let us,” was the answer.’
Lieutenant Colonel Chappuis agreed that ‘the tanks were the decisive factor.’ Reports vary, some claiming 2,600 prisoners and 600 bodies counted. Captain LeGrand K. Johnson called it ‘one of the worst massacres that I have ever seen. The firing was so heavy that most of the Germans were surrendering and quite a few of them did not have a chance and just had to stand there and take it.’ Another officer simply said, ‘The operation was hardly more than a mop-up. Within two hours the 2nd Battalion captured seven hundred prisoners.’ Chappuis had to radio for more military police as they had so many prisoners. The 3rd Battalion’s executive officer ‘got together a group of cooks, messengers and oddments and took over the guard detail until the MPs arrived’.
By 14.15 the 502nd, still supported by the Cromwell tanks, had captured Best and routed the remnants of the garrison there which had already been savaged by Lieutenant Wierzbowski and his men. Towards the end of the afternoon the squadron of the 15th/19th Hussars had to leave in a hurry, trundling due east towards Son. They had just received a message saying that the headquarters of the 101st was under attack, from part of Major von Maltzahn’s 107th Panzer-Brigade.
Hauptmann Wedemeyer had found a crossing over the Dommel, a massive culvert which separated the river from the Wilhelmina Canal. With a group of Mark V Panther tanks, Wedemeyer surprised Major General Taylor in his command post at Son where he had no more than a platoon to defend the new Bailey bridge. Shells started to explode in the small town and a British truck on the bridge was set on fire. Taylor sent some men off to stalk the Panthers with bazookas, while he drove straight to the nearby landing ground. He rounded up some men and a 57mm anti-tank gun from the 327th Glider Infantry, and brought them back in a hurry. A hit from a bazooka and another from the anti-tank gun convinced Wedemeyer that the bridge was more heavily defended than they had thought, and he withdrew his force just before the squadron of the 15th/19th Hussars arrived.
General Taylor, now fully aware of how vulnerable Hell’s Highway really was, brought back a battalion of the 506th from Eindhoven to ensure the safety of the Bailey bridge. The attack of the 107th Panzer-Brigade from the east was supposed to have been co-ordinated with the attack of the 59th Division from the west, so the Allies had been lucky that this had not worked. But it underlined the fact that the Germans could strike at will almost anywhere along the route and cut it. General Sir Miles Dempsey’s other two corps in the Second Army, VIII and XII Corps, which should have been flanking the XXX Corps advance, had been delayed, XII Corps by heavy resistance and VIII Corps, on the right, by the fuel crisis.
Eindhoven had enjoyed another day of celebration, singing and dancing in the streets. Girls dressed themselves in orange, ‘with big orange bows in their hair’, and horizontal red, white and blue flags could be seen everywhere. ‘A dummy in the uniform of a Dutch Nazi was hung from a lamppost and streets returned to their original names.’
‘We are free, thank God!’ another diarist wrote. ‘In the morning all the flags were out. The city is full of troops, mostly Americans. A never ending line of vehicles (the English Second Army) is coming from the south and going north. The PAN or Netherlands Partisans (hundreds of armed men) are guarding public buildings and collecting NSBers, whom they keep under guard. Women and girls who have fraternized with the Germans are being shorn of their hair. In Strijp this work is being done by an NSB hairdresser in a convent in the Bezemstraat.’
Dr Boyans saw a group on the edge of the town surrounding two attractive women. They were about to have their heads shorn. The shearer was clicking his scissors when two American paratroopers from the 101st Airborne with Thompson sub-machine guns broke the circle. They aimed their weapons at the self-appointed hairdressers. ‘Stop that nonsense!’ they ordered. Then, each one took a woman by the arm and led them off through the throng and into town. The frustrated avengers could do little but mutter. An elderly man, standing next to Dr Boyans, remarked quietly: ‘They’re no fools, these Americans. They’re looking for women with experience of life, and if you ask me, they’ve picked the right ones.’
Both General Brereton, the commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, and Major General Matthew Ridgway, the commander of XVIII Airborne Corps, arrived that evening in Eindhoven. Brereton was staying at Dempsey’s headquarters, because he knew Browning would not welcome his presence. And Ridgway was naturally still sore that his two American airborne divisions had been put under Browning instead of himself. In any case, the two generals could not have picked a worse moment to visit Eindhoven. Ridgway later claimed that he was bombed ‘every time he goes anywhere with Brereton’.
First of all, word spread of the 107th Panzer-Brigade rampaging to the north of the town. ‘We will never forget that evening and night of terror,’ a woman diarist wrote. ‘About 7 o’clock we heard the rumour that the Germans would re-enter Eindhoven and that there would be a great battle with tanks. We all had to quickly get back into our houses. Just when we had done so we were warned to take all our flags back inside – the flags that we had raised so full of pride and hope that morning. We were told the Germans would shoot at those houses showing [them].’
But the real danger came from the skies. Earlier in the day two squadrons of the Household Cavalry Regiment had begun escorting more than 800 vehicles north from Leopoldsburg, heading for Nijmegen. Night had just fallen as the head of this interminable column passed through Eindhoven. Parachute flares were dropped, lighting up the whole city in a deathly glare. This signalled the start of an extended raid by Luftwaffe bombers. Eighteen ammunition trucks and petrol bowsers of the Royal Army Service Corps went up in flames, causing ‘huge explosions’. As the fires reached the small-arms ammunition and shells it sounded as if a major battle had started. Captain John Profumo, the second-in-command of A Squadron (and many years later Britain’s secretary of state for war), organized civilian working parties with great speed to clear the debris and allow the column to continue. If it remained blocked in Eindhoven, then the bombers would keep coming back. The fire brigade could do little as bombs had also smashed the water mains, although British and American troops did what they could to fight the fires and rescue people.
‘A dreadful night,’ an inhabitant wrote. ‘A bombing of half an hour. Storm winds howl through the basements and cellars where people shelter. A latecomer is hurled inside by the blast. After the bombardment there remains a huge roar as if from cannon fire, but later we heard it was the noise from the burning trucks loaded with munitions.’ The woman diarist was deeply shaken too. ‘We all knew what fear was that night. People were killed in their cellars and we who did not have a cellar were standing in our kitchen and prayed without stop and prayed again. We were even given absolution as we had a priest visiting us at that time and that made us calmer. It was as if it would never end. Roof-tiles came down, all sorts of things came down, and always everything was accompanied by the ceaseless howling of shells overhead.’ Altogether 227 civilians were killed and another 800 wounded. With Arnhem and Nijmegen ablaze, and the centre of Eindhoven blasted by explosions, the joy of liberation had been cut short with brutality.