After the failure to get to the Nijmegen road bridge the evening before, the two very dissimilar divisional commanders, the lanky Jim Gavin and the Guards major general Allan Adair with his First World War moustache, were in complete agreement. Their only hope now was to clear the northern part of the city block by block. Each infantry company, whether Vandervoort’s paratroopers or Grenadiers, was to be supported by a troop of tanks.
Major Stanley waited with his company of Grenadiers for dawn in the Juliana Park, with much of the city ablaze around them. ‘It was a pretty tense business,’ he wrote, ‘just waiting, houses on fire and the fire coming our way, driving before it various bands of homeless natives. It was heart-breaking to see their helplessness.’ The huge numbers rendered homeless congregated in the St Canisius Hospital, which was experienced in dealing with disasters after the mistaken bombing of Nijmegen by American aircraft seven months before. The staff were having to feed up to 4,000 people a day.
The task facing the combat teams involved in each phase was made doubly dangerous with German assault guns moving around and suddenly opening fire. Adair therefore ordered that each street, once it had been cleared, should be blocked by an M-10 Achilles from Q Battery 21st Anti-Tank Regiment. This tank destroyer’s powerful 17-pounder gun could even knock out a Tiger tank. But, with most of the houses on fire, clearing block by block was going to be hard when faced with determined SS panzergrenadiers. The fire-raising continued during the gradual German withdrawal towards the Valkhof. Pioneers with flamethrowers smashed a window in each house, then blasted a stream of blazing fuel inside.
‘From the first five minutes the fighting did not conform in the slightest to my original plan,’ Stanley confessed. They were suffering heavy casualties out in the street so they needed to go through the houses and over garden walls, although the fires were spreading rapidly. Stanley saw a German throw a stick grenade which exploded at the feet of a fellow officer and Sergeant Partridge. ‘There was a hell of a bang, but the amazing thing was the only damage sustained was to Sergeant Partridge, who took the full blast right in his face, and was then only dazed for a few minutes, after which he got really angry and fairly set about the Hun.’ A very large house still lay ahead, and ‘we had not enough men to clear it,’ Stanley continued. ‘As we were having a bit of impertinence from them, we decided to cover the exits with Brens and to cook them. Phosphorus grenades and a borrowed incendiary from the Americans did the trick.’ The house caught fire and later began to explode. The Frundsberg had used it as their ammunition dump. Prisoners interrogated later claimed that there had still been many SS troopers trapped inside.
Eventually, Stanley was able to report that his area had been cleared. ‘Charlie Rutland was then unleashed. Having seen No 2 Company on their way, I went back to see the Commander who had set up his HQ in the Post Office.’ He had a quick sleep there after the long night. ‘But one’s peace of mind’, Stanley noted, with the slightly flippant hauteur of the Foot Guards, ‘was constantly and rudely jolted by a large and exceedingly rude enemy gun, either 150mm or 210mm, which intermittently plastered the whole area and made an awful mess of anything it hit.’
The third phase turned out to be the most bitter. With the thick smoke, tank commanders had to stick their heads out of the turret hatch if they were to see anything at all. German snipers and machine-gunners in the tops of buildings managed to kill or seriously wound four tank commanders in Major James Bowes-Lyon’s squadron. Major Gregory Hood’s squadron, working in from the east with Vandervoort’s paratroopers, experienced a savage battle with the SS panzergrenadiers defending the Keizer Lodewijkplein traffic circle by the Hunner Park.
Out to the west, Colonel Reuben Tucker’s paratroopers and Lieutenant Colonel Giles Vandeleur’s Shermans cleared the area behind the huge PGEM power station on the southern bank of the Waal. The two men had met at the XXX Corps command post early in the morning, and had left together in a scout car. The power station was close to where Major Julian Cook’s battalion was to launch its boats. Unfortunately the trucks bringing the boats were slowed at Son, where the 107th Panzer-Brigade was attacking again. A German shell reduced the number of serviceable boats from thirty-two to twenty-six.
A most unenviable task later that day awaited the King’s Company of the Grenadiers. Their objective was the Carolingian fortress, the Valkhof. The King’s Company first of all seized the police station, which had a commanding position. The attached machine-gun platoon found that it provided ‘a wonderful shoot’. The King’s Company went on to seize the port, and from there they could pour flanking fire on to the Valkhof. ‘All we knew was that it was going to take everything we had got to make headway towards that bloody bridge.’ While his division fought with Gavin’s paratroopers to clear the approaches to the southern end of the bridge, Major General Allan Adair expected the Germans to blow the whole structure at any moment. ‘I sat there gritting my teeth, dreading the sound of an explosion.’
One troop of Grenadier tanks had been ‘left out of battle’. The troop leader, Sergeant Peter Robinson, a tough and experienced regular soldier, knew that in the army there was no such thing as a free rest during a battle, and he wondered what their task would be. Just after midday, he received the order from his squadron commander, Major John Trotter, to go forward with him in a scout car to reconnoitre the road bridge. Trotter briefed him to have his troop of Shermans ready to charge it as soon as he received the signal. ‘You’ve got to get across at all costs.’ Trotter then tried to make reassuring comments about contacting Robinson’s wife ‘if anything happens to you’.
At the end of the morning, once the north-western section had been cleared, Major Cook, his company commanders and Captain Henry Keep, the battalion operations officer, drove in Jeeps to the power plant on the banks of the Waal, close to where they were to make the assault crossing. They climbed to the ninth floor, where they had a clear view right across the river to the German positions on the far side. They were joined by their regimental commander Colonel Tucker and Giles Vandeleur, but also by Browning, Horrocks and Gavin.
Through their binoculars the officers studied the far bank of the River Waal, which was some 300 metres wide at that point. ‘We saw green, grassy flatlands that ran for about 900 yards,’ wrote Henry Keep, ‘then rose to form a dyke with a two-lane road on it. This was the route we would follow to the railroad and highway bridges . . . We could see enemy machine-gun positions along the dyke and also on the flat terrain. We observed mortar and artillery units behind the dyke and 20mm guns on the railroad bridge . . . I felt rather funny inside. I think everyone else did too although no one said a word – we just looked.’ While they were studying the lie of the land, Allied supply aircraft flying north to Arnhem were greeted by ‘a veritable wall of small arms and flak’ from the positions across the river. Horrocks told Gavin how impressed he was that his paratroopers were able to sleep before such an ordeal. ‘Fortunately, none of them had seen what we had,’ Henry Keep observed.
The original idea was for the assault companies to get into their boats in the Maas–Waal Canal, just to the west of the PGEM building, as they would be out of sight. But ‘the current was too swift where the canal entered the river,’ so they had to launch the boats from the bank just upriver from the power station.
Vandeleur, whose tanks were to provide fire support for the crossing, had also brought Major Edward Tyler to discuss details with Colonel Tucker. The plan to cross the river ‘put the fear of God in me’, Tyler said. He asked Tucker if his paratroopers were trained in assault crossings. Tucker replied that it would be a case of ‘on-the-job training’. He added, ‘Just stop the Krauts shooting at us and we’ll do the rest.’ Tyler was concerned about his tanks hitting the paratroopers, but Tucker told him to keep firing. If they were too close then his men would fire flares or wave banners.
Tyler was concerned that his sixteen tanks silhouetted on a skyline would be vulnerable, so he spaced them out as much as he could with twenty metres between them. There was a tall wire fence in front which the Shermans would push flat by advancing slowly. Tyler was dismayed to find that at ground level it was impossible to identify the well-camouflaged German gun positions, which had been quite easy to spot from the top of the power station. Tucker’s 2nd Battalion, with every machine gun they could lay their hands on, also took up position to increase the volume of fire. Well to their rear, the Leicestershire Yeomanry with their Sexton self-propelled 25-pounder guns would be providing the smoke screen.
The delay to the trucks bringing the boats did not help Cook’s battalion to relax. ‘As the hour of three o’clock approached,’ Lieutenant Virgil F. Carmichael observed, ‘the men became more nervous and tense. I clearly remember one man taking out a Camel cigarette, lighting it with a valued Zippo lighter and throwing the pack away and throwing the Zippo away, saying that he would have no need of them no more. As it turned out, he did not.’ Major Cook tried to lighten the atmosphere by joking that ‘he was going to imitate George Washington in the well-known picture crossing the Delaware. He was going to stand erect in the boat and with clenched right fist pushed forward overhead, he was going to shout: “Onward men, onward!”’ Purely because another officer had been expected to take command of the battalion, Cook had not been well received when he arrived, but that was about to change dramatically with the bravery and leadership he would show that day.
Behind the embankment and the tanks, Cook’s officers split their platoons, allocating thirteen men to each assault boat. When the trucks eventually arrived just before 15.00, the paratroopers were appalled to find that the twenty-six boats were just canvas on a flat-bottomed wooden frame. Two companies, H and I, were to form the first wave. G Company would follow as soon as the three men of the 307th Airborne Engineers, who were to crew each boat, managed to bring them back. As many recognized, the engineers had the most terrifying job of all.
The Leicestershire Yeomanry opened fire with smoke shells at exactly 15.00. When the order was given at 15.15, the paratroopers and engineers ‘shouldered the boats like coffins, with their outside hand carrying weapons’, and ran over the top of the dyke, then down the slope. They slipped and slid in the mud, struggling to get their boats straight in the water as they clambered aboard.
As soon as the assault boats were in the water, the Irish Guards in the Shermans opened up with their thirty-two Browning machine guns, and so did Tucker’s 2nd Battalion with theirs. The 376th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion took on targets further to the rear. At first the smokescreen provided by the Leicestershire Yeomanry worked quite well, but soon large gaps started to appear. Tucker asked Giles Vandeleur if his tanks could help. Each Sherman had only a dozen smoke shells, so they did not last long. The Irish Guards also found that their Browning machine guns had got so hot from firing that they ‘ran away’, which meant that even when the trigger was released they carried on firing until the belt was finished.
Lieutenant Carmichael, who was in the first boat with Major Cook, a devout Catholic, heard him ‘saying his Rosary and as he struck the water with his paddle, you could hear him say: “Hail Mary, full of grace”, on through the Rosary, repeating it over and over again as he paddled as hard as he could toward the other bank’. There was no question of standing in the prow like Washington. Everyone paddled as hard as they could, some even using their rifle butts or hands. Henry Keep, who had been an oarsman at Princeton, was counting ‘one-two-three-four’, but their efforts were all over the place. Keep had ‘a rather incongruous vision of our coxswain at Princeton on Lake Carnegie pounding rhythmically on the sides of the flimsy shell and of our rowing in unison pulling to the time of his beats’. Then, the Germans began firing in earnest, with small-arms and machine-gun fire from the positions in front, and machine-gun and 20mm fire from the small nineteenth-century Hof van Holland fortress slightly to their right, and even from the railway bridge a whole kilometre beyond that.
At first the fire was erratic, but then the Germans started to get the range and it increased greatly in intensity. ‘There was smoke on the water,’ Lieutenant John Gorman of the Irish Guards noted. ‘You could see the splashes as the bullets hit [and] the Americans sitting in the boats suddenly slump over.’ Some compared the effect of bullets on the water’s surface to a hailstorm. ‘It was a horrible, horrible sight,’ Giles Vandeleur recorded. ‘Boats were literally being blown out of the water. I could see huge geysers of water shooting up as the shells hit the water, and the small arms fire coming from the northern bank made the river look like some sort of seething cauldron.’ If one of the engineers steering a boat was hit, then it circled aimlessly until someone else took over.
‘In everyone’s ears’, wrote Henry Keep, ‘was the constant roar of bursting artillery shells, the dull wham of a 20mm, or the disconcerting ping of rifle bullets.’ There was also the unmistakable thwack whenever a bullet struck a body. One boat had so many holes in it that men were bailing water with their helmets. The arm muscles of those paddling screamed with the strain. Lieutenant Hyman D. Shapiro, the assistant medical officer, recognized that in such a battle all he could do was bring extra dressings and morphine. ‘Doctors were little more than glorified aid-men,’ he said. ‘I looked up at the man sitting beside me and saw his head disappear,’ presumably the result of a direct hit from a 20mm shell. Like the Protestant chaplain who sat just behind him, Shapiro’s main purpose was to provide moral support. The chaplain, Captain Delbert Kuehl – ‘a rough tough Alaska sourdough who saw the light . . . really saw it’ in Shapiro’s words – was exhausted from paddling. Shapiro did not notice him hand his paddle to someone else, so on seeing that Kuehl’s hands were empty, he handed him his.
Every man on that crossing had a sensation of utter vulnerability. ‘I felt as naked as the day I was born,’ Henry Keep wrote. ‘We were soaked, gasping for breath, dead tired, and constantly expecting to feel that searing sensation as the bullet tears through you. I wanted to vomit; many did. Somehow or other we were three-quarters of the way across. Everyone was yelling to keep it up, but there was little strength left in anyone . . . But at last we reached the other side. We climbed over the wounded and dead in the bottom of the boat. And up to our knees in water waded to shore, where behind a small embankment we flopped down gasping for breath, safe for the moment from the incessant firing.’
Out of the twenty-six boats that made the initial crossing, only eleven returned to collect the second wave. Some had sunk, others drifted with the strong current, with their cargo of dead and men so badly wounded that they could do nothing. Dutch civilians further downstream, having seen what was happening, waded out to pull the casualties into shore.
Lieutenant Gorman of the Irish Guards watched the first wave reach the bank. ‘I was horrified by the smallness of their numbers. I didn’t see how they could possibly get a foothold with so few men.’ Along with Browning, Horrocks and Tucker, Giles Vandeleur had a grandstand view from the top of the power station. ‘My God! What a courageous sight it was! They just moved across that field steadily. I never saw a single man lie down until he was hit.’ Yet from across the river the effect of distance made it look as if the paratroopers were just strolling about. Once the first wave was on the far bank, Major Tyler ordered his sixteen tanks to lift their machine-gun fire and to start hammering the Hof van Holland with their 75mm guns. They began with armour-piercing, then switched to high explosive. That prompted the crews of the two twin 20mm guns on the fort to switch their fire to the Shermans, and they killed one of Tyler’s tank commanders.
At one point Tyler saw a grey horse towing an anti-tank gun on its own towards the railway bridge. The crew must have been killed. He gave the order to fire at it. And one of the tank gunners, a former groom who loved horses, managed to hit the weapon with a solid armour-piercing round, destroying it utterly without harming the grey. The range was almost a kilometre. The horse walked on ‘as unconcerned as if he had been out making the morning milk deliveries’.
The tanks started to run short of ammunition and a haze from the fighting made it extremely hard to distinguish American soldiers from German. But by then there was no doubt who was winning. ‘All along the shore line now our troops were appearing deployed as skirmishers,’ Keep’s account continued. ‘They were running into murderous fire from the embankment 800 yards away, but they continued to move forward across the plain in a long single line many hundreds of yards wide. They cursed and yelled at each other as they advanced, non-coms and officers giving directions, the men firing from the hip their BARs [Browning Automatic Rifles], machine-guns and rifles. Steadily they moved forward. All this time the 2nd Battalion and the tanks on the other side of the river were giving us marvellous support.
‘Many times I have seen troops who are driven to a fever pitch – troops who, for a brief interval of combat, are lifted out of themselves – fanatics rendered crazy by rage and the lust for killing – men who forget temporarily the meaning of fear. It is then that the great military feats of history occur which are commemorated so gloriously in our text books. It is an awe-inspiring sight, but not a pretty one.’ Staff Sergeant Clark Fuller described his own experience of this sudden metamorphosis from fear to fearlessness. ‘When we finally got to the opposite shore, I experienced a feeling I never felt before. All the fear of the past fifteen or twenty minutes seemed to leave me, to be replaced by a surge of reckless abandon that threw caution to the winds. I felt as though I could lick the whole German army.’ The courage and aggression of the American paratroopers prompted one Guards officer to observe: ‘I think these paratroopers must be fed on dynamite or raw meat.’
Any notion of belonging to a particular platoon or company had disappeared in the confusion. Officers collected whatever men were near them and charged off in small groups to attack the isolated strongpoints on the way to the bridge. Most of the German troops defending this sector of the Waal came from a replacement battalion which had arrived from Herford the day before. SS-Untersturmführer Gernot Traupel, Reinhold’s adjutant, had been shaken to see them when they arrived. ‘The soldiers were very young, about seventeen years of age, and they looked to me like children even though I was only twenty-one years old.’ When paratroopers killed them in their foxholes they hauled the bodies out and, using them as sandbags, fired from behind them until they had caught their breath again. Colonel Tucker, catching up with his men, pulled one of the boys out of his foxhole by the scruff of his neck. They were all quivering in fear. He told them in German that they were prisoners of war and would not be shot. As soon as Tucker loosened his grip the boy jumped back into his hole to cower there.
As Cook’s men moved east along the embankment towards the railway bridge, they first had to deal with the Hof van Holland fort surrounded by its stagnant moat. According to Lieutenant Carmichael, one man managed ‘through some vigorous action [by swimming the moat and climbing the wall] to get on top of Fort van Holland and while there our men would toss live hand grenades up to him, and he would pull the pin and drop them into the portholes from his protected position on top of the fort.’ At the same time, a small group of men charged over the wooden bridge and into the tunnel which led to the open courtyard within. Those inside surrendered quickly. Bill Downs of CBS reported that seventy-five German bodies were dumped in the algae-covered moat.
Pushing on towards the railway bridge, Lieutenant Richard G. La Riviere, always known as ‘Rivers’, reported that they ran into a bunch of German soldiers who wanted to surrender. He estimated that there were thirty or forty of them, ‘ordinary run of the mill soldiers’, but as there were only fifteen to twenty paratroopers, they shot the Germans on the spot. In the chaos of the fight, paratroopers found money scattered along the road after a German paymaster had abandoned his case in flight. They grabbed just a few banknotes as souvenirs, not imagining that they were valid currency.
By this time it was almost dusk. Anyone who looked back across the river would have seen the dreadful sight of Nijmegen on fire, with the flames reflected on the water. As Captain Carl W. Kappel’s group came to the railway bridge, they saw Germans jumping in panic from the side, nearly a hundred feet above the water. Some were so scared that they leaped even though they were still over the riverbank. According to some accounts, they had tried to surrender and been told to give themselves up to the paratroopers on the south side. ‘There was confusion,’ a captain reported, ‘and at that point several Germans threw grenades on our men who opened fire with rifles and machineguns.’ Once firing started, there was no stopping it. Some of the paratroopers tried to shoot the Germans jumping from the bridge in mid-air, but Kappel ordered them to stop as they were running short of ammunition. They swung German machine guns, mounted to cover the bridge, and opened fire with them instead.
Trapped by men from the 2nd Battalion on the southern side, the Germans suffered a fearful massacre. ‘I did see old German men grab our M1s and beg for mercy,’ Corporal Jack Bommer recounted. ‘They were shot point blank. Such is war.’ He remembered an officer saying before they climbed into the boats, ‘No prisoners, just shoot them. There’s no time.’ Captain Kappel spoke to the company commander from the 1st Battalion which had followed them. This officer boasted that they had taken many more prisoners than Cook’s battalion. ‘You captured yours,’ Kappel retorted. ‘We shot ours.’
Without counting those who jumped, 267 bodies were retrieved from the railway bridge alone, but one report states that 175 prisoners were taken there. There were apparently also cases of paratroopers removing gold wedding rings from dead Germans, which usually required cutting off the finger. A number of their comrades strongly disapproved, but it did little good in the savage atmosphere of victory. Word spread in the German army about the massacre. Oberst Fullriede wrote in his diary a week later: ‘The Americans behaved – as always – in a contemptible fashion. They threw our wounded from the bridge into the Waal and shot the few home guard they took prisoner.’ The throwing of wounded into the river was almost certainly not true, yet it reflected the fear and hatred which German troops felt for the American airborne, having been told by Nazi propaganda that they were all recruited from the toughest jails.
The Irish Guards passed back a radio message to announce that the 3rd Battalion had reached the railway bridge, but the Guards Armoured Division understood that they had reached the great road bridge, a kilometre further on. Major Trotter gave the word to Sergeant Robinson to prepare. The Grenadiers, however, were still fighting against Euling’s battalion of SS panzergrenadiers in and around the Valkhof, and the rest of Trotter’s Shermans were firing rapidly in support. Euling’s command post was in the sixteenth-century brick tower, the Belvedere, between the Valkhof and the bridge. A German artillery observation officer, after his radio set had been destroyed, had managed to continue obtaining fire support from across the river by shooting flares at the intended target.
‘The King’s Company of the Grenadiers, with the tallest men in the regiment,’ wrote Major Stanley, ‘stormed the fort after breaking in through an unguarded alley.’ Their commander was killed, with a bullet through the head. Euling’s panzergrenadiers claimed to have shot eighteen Grenadiers in the head. Captain Bestebreurtje later saw the slogans Euling’s men had painted on walls in the Valkhof. ‘We black ones trust the Führer’; ‘Our faith is loyalty’ (which was the SS motto); ‘Rather death than tyranny’; ‘The coward is a scoundrel’; ‘Death to the Murderers of the Homeland’; and ‘We believe in Adolf Hitler and our victory’.
Robinson commanded his troop from a Firefly Sherman with the powerful 17-pounder gun. He was given absolute radio priority so that he could keep in constant touch with divisional headquarters. ‘It seemed the whole town was burning,’ Robinson remembered, as the four tanks charged towards the ramp. His tank was hit just as they got to the bridge and his radio was knocked out, so he took over the next Sherman, much to the anger of the sergeant who commanded it.
Captain Lord Carrington, the second-in-command of No. 1 Squadron (and much later Margaret Thatcher’s foreign secretary), stood in the turret of his tank knowing that he was next to go. Close by, Lieutenant Tony Jones, of the 14th Field Squadron Royal Engineers, was also ready. His task was to deal with any wires and explosive charges as soon as the tanks crossed over. ‘The sight of tracer flashing down the centre of the huge road bridge really made me feel we had a chance of capturing it intact,’ he recorded. ‘I can still see Peter Carrington’s face as he looked down from the turret of his tank before going over. He looked thoughtful, to say the least of it.’
Colonel Vandervoort later recalled that ‘It was pretty spectacular. When the lead tank reached the crest of the bridge, it came under fire from an 88mm gun sandbagged into the side of the highway about 100 or so yards from the north end of the bridge. The tank and the 88 exchanged about six rounds apiece with the tank spitting .30 tracers all the while. Quite a show in the gathering dusk. The tank was not hit and the 88 ceased fire.’ Sergeant Robinson thought that his tank had knocked it out with a direct hit from their main armament.
During the dash across the bridge, Robinson had not realized that a German rifleman high in the superstructure of the bridge had been shooting at him. He was too busy directing his own tank’s fire and operating the turret-mounted Browning to gun down fleeing German infantrymen. Robinson and his crew could feel their tank bumping over the bodies of those they had killed, and later found their tank tracks covered in blood. The scene was also observed from the village of Lent by Brigadeführer Harmel, who said, ‘I always had a cigar in my mouth, and in critical moments I would light it . . . when I first saw the British tanks I lit the cigar.’
Robinson and his tanks carried on for a little way through Lent to where the road goes under the railway line. Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne opened fire at them and they fired back, but fortunately both sides realized their mistake before anyone was hurt. In their relief, the paratroopers jumped on the tank, kissing it and, it seems, the tank commander. But from then on accounts diverge wildly: the Guards refusing to advance without orders and the paratroopers accusing them of cowardice and abandoning their airborne comrades. Carrington arrived some time afterwards and a defensive perimeter was formed with the four tanks facing outwards. Robinson, Carrington and their crews stayed awake either by walking around or by sitting against one of the tanks. They shared a bottle of whisky which Carrington had brought with him, while they waited for a company of the Irish Guards to join them.
Some highly coloured American accounts describe officers from the 82nd Airborne berating Carrington for his refusal to advance because he had been ordered to await infantry support. One even claimed that he had put his Thompson sub-machine gun to Carrington’s head. It is rather more likely that the righteous indignation of the Americans was so intense that they convinced themselves in hindsight that they really had told the British what they thought of them.*
Just behind Robinson’s tanks, Lieutenant Jones of the 14th Field Squadron had begun cutting wires as soon as they were on the road bridge. A troop of his Royal Engineers arrived immediately afterwards and began removing the explosive charges. It proved anxious work, as officers from Cook’s battalion also found. ‘Countless Krauts who had been trapped in the middle of the bridge when both ends had been secured had sought temporary refuge high up in the steel girders. From these vantage points they continued to fire at us and also at the vehicles as they passed beneath them. In spite of the darkness we constantly sprayed them with automatic fire. As dawn broke a gruesome sight greeted the eyes. Intertwined grotesquely throughout the massive steel girders were the bodies of dead Krauts, looking for all the world like a group of gargoyles leering hideously at the passers-by hundreds of feet below.’
Both Grenadiers and Cook’s paratroopers were convinced that they had taken the Nijmegen road bridge first. Perhaps inevitably in the circumstances few accounts tally, even on the same side. Several American versions indicate that the tanks were across first, and a few British ones that American paratroopers were there already. Such a debate, however, is futile. It is far more important to understand the reasons for the British failure to advance on to Arnhem that night. Tucker and his paratroopers were understandably furious. Cook’s battalion and the engineers manning the boats had suffered 89 dead and 151 wounded. They naturally believed that the only reason for their semi-suicidal crossing of the Waal in full daylight was because every hour counted if XXX Corps was to save the 1st Airborne at Arnhem. Otherwise, the attack could have waited until after dark.
Horrocks must shoulder most of the blame for the resulting damage to Anglo-American relations. He had supported Gavin’s plan for the assault crossing of the Waal. To underline the urgency, he had emphasized to Tucker’s officers the desperate situation which the 1st Airborne Division faced, and the American paratroopers were better able than most to imagine what it would be like for their British counterparts. Then as soon as they had achieved their objective with heavy losses and almost unbelievable courage, nothing happened. Horrocks even wrote in his memoirs: ‘Another hurdle had been overcome and I went to bed a happy man.’
There were many good reasons why the Guards Armoured Division, and especially the Grenadiers, could not push on that night. For a start, the Grenadier group had suffered heavy casualties in Nijmegen, and they were still fighting Euling’s panzergrenadiers until after 22.00, so they could not disengage. And apart from Robinson’s troop, all their tanks were low on ammunition and fuel. This was why Brigadier Gwatkin and Major General Adair decided to switch back to having the Irish Guards in the lead, but due to the chaos in the burning city of Nijmegen the Irish Guards tanks had not yet been resupplied with ammunition after their massive expenditure in support of the crossing.
Horrocks, on the other hand, should have foreseen these problems and ensured that some well-prepared battle group was waiting and ready to advance rapidly north towards Arnhem through the night. He was not one of those fixated by the doctrine that armour should operate only in daylight. ‘I was a great believer in using tanks at night,’ he wrote. ‘I tried it on three occasions and was successful each time. It has a shattering effect on the morale of the enemy.’ Horrocks may have been exhausted once again from his injuries, but this was not the moment to go ‘to bed a happy man’.
Whether or not the road to Arnhem was wide open that night has been another area of debate, but even the strongest and freshest battle group with General George Patton lashing them on would have been lucky to get through. That afternoon the Germans had retaken the Arnhem road bridge and were sending panzergrenadiers and Tiger tanks south to Nijmegen. The simple truth is that XXX Corps was too late, and so was the capture of the Nijmegen bridge as a result of defending the Groesbeek heights.
On the German side there was fury, frustration and bewilderment. As soon as Robinson’s tanks had crossed, Brigadeführer Harmel – who was watching from the village of Lent – went straight to Reinhold’s command tank. He radioed Bittrich to warn him that the Allies were over the Waal. Teleprinters began chattering and telephones ringing in various headquarters, with a good deal of shouting. Model’s chief of staff Generalleutnant Hans Krebs was having to field a lot of difficult calls, sometimes by pretending that nothing had changed. At 18.35, ‘On being asked by the chief of staff of the Wehrmacht Befehlshaber Niederland about the blowing up of the bridges over the Waal, the chief of staff of the Army Group explained that the Nijmegen bridges should not be blown up for the time being.’ In another communication at the same time, he insisted that with the forces rapidly despatched from Arnhem, including two panzergrenadier battalions, several Tigers and assault guns, ‘the breakthrough on to the north bank of the Waal should be sealed off.’ Less than an hour later, the operations officer at II SS Panzer Corps rang Model’s headquarters to report that the enemy was now definitely established across the Waal. ‘The situation is extraordinarily tense.’
Some German officers, including Brigadeführer Harmel of the SS Frundsberg, tried to claim that despite Model’s order not to blow the bridge the plunger had been pushed but nothing happened. Harmel even said that he gave the order as the Grenadier tanks were crossing, but this version of events was presumably the reaction of an officer hoping to protect himself from Hitler’s fury. Others maintain even less convincingly that its demolition was delayed so that the remnants of Euling’s battalion could escape.
Model was angry and embarrassed. That morning he had again refused Bittrich’s request to blow the two bridges and withdraw to the north bank. He had insisted that ‘the bridgehead be maintained’. He had been convinced that Reinhold’s and Euling’s SS panzergrenadiers would be able to hold on, so when he heard about the Allied crossing he made noises about putting both men in front of a court martial. (In fact both Reinhold and Euling instead received the Knight’s Cross for their leadership and bravery.) Model could hardly deny the existence of his own order. SS-Obergruppenführer Rauter stated, ‘The commander-in-chief of the Army Group, Generalfeldmarschall Model, informed me personally that he reserved for himself [the decision] to blow the Nijmegen bridge. He wanted the bridge to be left intact in all circumstances.’ Model may have been a brutal commander-in-chief, but he was not one to try to pass the blame on to a subordinate. When the frantic telephone calls came from the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, Bittrich’s headquarters described the outcome simply. ‘The question from the Wehrmacht command staff about the responsibility for the failure to blow the bridges was answered by Army Group.’ At that stage of the war, only Model could have faced Hitler’s fury and got away with it.
Brigadier General Gavin had not been able to see his men’s feat of arms crossing the Waal. At about 13.30 when still at the power station, he had received an urgent call over the radio from his chief of staff, who had been calling him without success for nearly an hour and a half. ‘General, you’d better get the hell back here, or you won’t have any division left.’ Major attacks had developed in the north against Wyler and Beek, against Groesbeek in the centre, and in the south against Mook. They consisted of Kampfgruppe Becker in the north, Kampfgruppe Greschick in the centre from the 406th Division and Kampfgruppe Hermann in the south, with the first six battalions from Meindl’s II Fallschirmjäger Corps supported by some Mark V Panther tanks.
Gavin drove off rapidly in his Jeep back to the divisional command post. He felt bitter that bad weather in England and a shortage of aircraft had yet again delayed the arrival of the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment. His forces were far too stretched to defend a sector some fifty kilometres long. The greatest danger was in the south, where the attack on Mook threatened the Heumen bridge and the XXX Corps supply line. Gavin’s insistence on bringing in airborne artillery early paid off when the 456th Parachute Field Artillery managed to slow the German advance, with help from a squadron of tanks from the Coldstream Guards. There was fighting in the streets of Mook and in the houses.
Gavin, on reaching his command post, was surprised to see Major General Matthew Ridgway, the commander of XVIII Airborne Corps, talking to members of his staff. Gavin concentrated on studying the situation map, rather than on the courtesies of briefing his superior officer. Things looked so dire that he felt he had to leave for Mook straight away, and did so, without acknowledging Ridgway’s presence. Ridgway did not forgive Gavin’s behaviour for some time. He was already in a foul mood after the bombing in Eindhoven where he had become separated from General Brereton, but above all because Browning was commanding the corps in action and not him. The bad British planning and their lack of drive exasperated him and seemed to confirm his worst prejudices.
When Gavin reached the edge of Mook, he found a paratrooper with a bazooka ‘shaking visibly’, and a Coldstream Guards tank on fire which had run over an American mine. He told the sergeant and lieutenant who were with him to go up on to the embankment with their rifles and start firing as fast as they could to give the impression of a strong defence. A paratrooper from the 505th then appeared with a prisoner, ‘a real apple-cheeked kid about eighteen, a fine, tough-looking kid’. He was in Fallschirmjäger uniform. Gavin went forward, squirming on his belly across a road and then on to the line of foxholes ahead to reassure his men that reinforcements were coming. This was doubly impressive considering that the young commander was in such pain from his back that he found his hands were becoming numb. During a lull a few days later, he visited the doctor who, unaware of the cracked spine, said it was just part of the nervous system reacting to the stress of battle. Gavin carried on. ‘Physical damage to you doesn’t mean much in battle if you’re really into the battle,’ he observed later. ‘If you are so excited and carried away you don’t know things like that. You can get shot without knowing what’s happening to you.’ Gavin made a habit of deliberate understatement. Horrocks was tickled by his casual remark, ‘We’re just having a bit of a patrol,’ when his men were launching a major raid or attack.
Mook was retaken in a counter-attack, but by then Gavin had moved north. Kampfgruppe Becker had advanced through Wyler to take Beek, and was pushing towards Berg en Dal. Brigadier Gwatkin, having heard of the threat, sent a troop of Q Battery, 21st Anti-Tank Regiment in their M-10 Achilles tank destroyers to Beek, which certainly helped. Gavin arrived to encourage the men in the front line, and was relieved to find that their battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Louis Mendez, appeared well in control.
The Kampfgruppe Greschick attacking Groesbeek proved to be the least of Gavin’s worries. German riflemen had infiltrated the small town the previous night through a culvert underneath the railway track and in this way they managed to reach the centre. They stood little chance against the better-trained and better-armed American paratroopers. Father Hoek recounted that they dug a large grave for seven German soldiers that day, but left it open in case there were any more, and there certainly were. Groesbeekers greatly admired the relaxed way American paratroopers set off to fight, a gun in one hand and an apple in the other.
Further south, the 101st was also under pressure as the Germans tried to cut Hell’s Highway in two places. At dawn the 107th Panzer-Brigade, with a motorized battalion of Fallschirmjäger, attacked Son again. ‘They drove their tanks up to the canal bank,’ Lieutenant Colonel Hannah reported, ‘and pinned down most of the personnel in one of our battalions.’ Major General Taylor found his command post in a school under direct fire. A XXX Corps convoy rolling north was under threat, but fortunately the 15th/19th Hussars were still in the area, and counter-attacked with the 1st Battalion of the 506th. They were then supported by part of the 44th Royal Tank Regiment which had been heading towards Helmond, with the 2nd Battalion. There were anxious moments for the 101st Airborne Military Police Platoon guarding nearly 2,000 prisoners in a cage, little more than 400 metres away from the Panthers. ‘Our own command post and supporting troops pulled out and left us sitting practically on the front lines,’ wrote a sergeant. ‘We had our interpreters tell the prisoners to lie down and be quiet.’ There was also a Luftwaffe attack, but fortunately no prisoners were hit.
The 107th Panzer-Brigade withdrew, somewhat battered by the British armoured squadrons. That evening, it reported the loss of seven tanks and twelve half-tracks. Even so, Colonel Hannah was struck by how badly Allied intelligence had ‘underestimated the enemy strength and degree of organization from the beginning of the operation. In every case, the Germans far exceeded the expected rate of reorganization, and were able to launch a coordinated attack with infantry and armor by D plus 2 [19 September] which was entirely unexpected.’
With none of the 101st Airborne’s supply trucks getting through the congestion on Hell’s Highway, the paratroopers were on short rations. Having used up their initial three days’ supply, they had to live off turnips, as well as food captured from the Germans or donated by ever-generous Dutch civilians. Fortunately for the Allies, B Squadron of the Household Cavalry Regiment discovered that day a vast German food store at Oss. (It also engaged a steamer flying the Nazi flag and three barges sailing along the Waal, which prompted regimental headquarters to reply to its report: ‘Congratulations on brilliant naval action. Splice Mainbrace.’)
General Taylor reinforced the Son crossing with a battalion and decided to move his headquarters to Kasteel Henkenshage, on the western edge of St Oedenrode. An advance detail then returned to say that German tanks were attacking the new command post. Taylor called Lieutenant Colonel Cassidy at St Oedenrode and said to him: ‘Can you clear them out? I don’t like tanks round me.’ Cassidy, who had six tanks from the 44th Royal Tank Regiment attached to his battalion, took them up the road to sort out the situation.
That day one of Cassidy’s platoons captured a prisoner from Heydte’s 6th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment after an engagement. He told them that his patrol had been sent out specially to destroy Sergeant McCrory’s tank. The Irish Guards sergeant, meanwhile, had been asked by Cassidy to see if he could help evacuate any survivors from two British tanks knocked out by Panzerfausts on the road to Koevering. ‘If all they have up there is a bazooka,’ McCrory replied, ‘we shall knock it out.’ The American who wrote the report for Brereton’s headquarters was clearly mesmerized by the larger than life Sergeant McCrory.
When they reached the two damaged Shermans, McCrory climbed down from his tank and went to the first one. The commander was very badly wounded. ‘He saw that he was still breathing but that his skull was laid back and his brains hanging out and that another shard had ripped his abdomen open and bared his intestines. He was beyond help. An American soldier then witnessed McCrory ‘suddenly spring from the tank and run forward rapidly about 20 yards towards the right hand ditch, pulling out his revolver as he ran. As he came to it, he fired down and a little forward four or five times.’ McCrory returned to the tank with a dead suckling piglet in his hand. He threw it to the American, saying: ‘Tonight, we’ll eat.’
McCrory continued the advance, taking the place of the two knocked-out tanks. He carried on in his slowly grinding vehicle even when they came under fire from a German 88mm gun concealed in a house. He fired three rounds of 75mm into the house, ‘then skip-fired three more rounds into the garden, getting the 88’. Six dead Germans were found inside. By now the Sherman tank was almost level with a monastery. ‘McCrory figured the steeple was being used for an [observation post] and said to his gunner: “Aim right for the cross.” The gunner hesitated. McCrory told him again: “I said aim for the cross.” So he fired and ruined whatever usefulness the steeple might have had.’ A German armoured reconnaissance vehicle appeared and the gunner hit that with his first round.
The Bailey bridge at Son had been an obvious choke point on the XXX Corps supply route, but in Generaloberst Student’s view ‘The most sensitive spot was Veghel, the “wasp-waist” of the enemy corridor.’
Veghel, in the words of Captain Laurence Critchell, was ‘a neat, cheerful and homey little town . . . with plane-trees and a village square’. Although disappointed not to find any tulips or windmills, the captain relished the fact that ‘Colonel Johnson found himself in the sort of setting he liked best. It was bristling with comic-opera war.’ So many people wanted to provide information on the Germans that Johnson’s staff had to post reliable members of the underground outside their headquarters to filter all those demanding an audience. ‘The collaborators were routed out of their homes for a long-delayed retribution. The girls were mostly rather young and sensual-featured, and they went undemonstrably to have their hair shorn; they seemed to accept it as an expected fate . . . and the Dutch crowds who watched the tonsorial administration of justice displayed none of the sickening and almost animal glee that French crowds showed on similar occasions. They were amused, that was all.’
The gaiety of the young in the streets was infectious, when they sang and danced in clothes of symbolic orange and scarves made from parachute silk. And their parents never complained when soldiers dug foxholes and slit trenches in their lawns and rosebeds. But the idyll of liberation came to an abrupt end during the afternoon of Tuesday 19 September when German artillery began to bombard the town. Paratroopers in their foxholes dropped out of sight ‘like prairie dogs’.
The 59th Infanterie-Division attacked Veghel from Schijndel. Student himself went to observe. ‘I watched a flak-platoon from the Reichsarbeitsdienst, which with its two large 88mm guns was shooting at American snipers who sat in the tall trees and hindered our attack from the flank. Meanwhile east of the canal around Dinther, in the marshy and difficult forest and scrub terrain, the Fallschirm-Marsch-Bataillon under Major Jungwirth was fighting its own small war . . . But with their light weapons they could not prevent the reinforced 1st Battalion of the 501st from taking Dinther and Heeswijk on 20 September.’
The battalion was hardly reinforced. It was just superbly led, and executed a brilliant encircling manoeuvre. Colonel Johnson had finally given in to the pleading of Lieutenant Colonel Harry Kinnard that he mount a sweep along the canal to the north-west towards Heeswijk, where all their jump casualties had been captured by the Germans in the castle there. Kinnard had argued that because the corridor was so narrow, their only hope of holding off the Germans was by offensive action. Kinnard’s operation that day was hugely successful, netting 480 prisoners for the cost of two men wounded. Some of the prisoners were so young that they had not even started shaving. If Kinnard’s battalion had been reinforced, as Student tried to claim, then its auxiliaries had consisted of Dutch volunteers on bicycles acting as unarmed scouts, pedalling ahead and off to the flanks. Johnson, impressed by Kinnard’s results, decided to repeat the exercise next day, with two battalions this time. They would mount a night attack due west to Schijndel. The battle for Hell’s Highway was about to escalate rapidly.
Although finally free of German occupation, the citizens of Nijmegen were in no mood to celebrate. The carnage from the battle for the bridge shocked all those who saw it. ‘It was there that I saw precisely what war really signifies,’ wrote Father Wilhelmus Peterse, whom the Americans named ‘the priest on the bridge’, after his ministrations in the wake of the fighting. ‘Mutilated bodies. Severely wounded and dying soldiers. The road was littered with hand grenades.’ The casualties were all German, but that did not of course stop Father Peterse from kneeling to comfort the dying and help the wounded, while captured German medics worked on their fellow countrymen under the eye of an American officer.
German soldiers concealed in cavities below the bridges emerged to surrender. Lieutenant Jones, the Royal Engineer, was assisted by a prisoner with excellent English but without any boots, who showed him where the explosives were concealed. The prisoners, who included some marines and a few Russian Hiwis in Wehrmacht uniform, were marched to the southern end. Suddenly a shot rang out and an American airborne officer fell dead. The SS officer responsible who had concealed himself in the girders was riddled with bullets.
When German prisoners from the bridge were escorted into the town, ‘Their reception by the civilian population was none too friendly,’ observed Father Peterse, ‘but wars aren’t won that way.’ Albertus Uijen also witnessed their reception. ‘There is whistling and jeering at German prisoners-of-war . . . They walk with their arms raised. One of them cannot keep this up. One hand is practically gone, just a lump of raw flesh. Blood is pouring down. Their appearance is awful. Black as soot or sallow, sweaty, torn uniforms, no more helmets or belts, no more badges, no more buttons even. It is a dreadful sight. Suddenly I am struck again by the beastliness, the absurdity of war.’ The American paratroopers escorting them tell the Dutch, who are hooting and hissing, to stay calm.
‘The inner town was one great heap of ruins,’ Father Peterse recorded. ‘On Burchtstraat an enormous tank was buried under the rubble of houses that had collapsed. Occasional shots were heard among the ruins. No doubt some foolish Germans who wanted to vent their rage.’ Volunteers, in overalls and gloves, were already collecting the dead from the streets on horse-drawn wagons and recording unexploded shells for disposal later. In the less damaged southern part of Nijmegen, an American paratrooper ‘noted that there were lots of mounds of earth and wooden crosses stuck in the narrow grassy area between street and sidewalk. The local people had gathered up the German corpses and buried them.’ But the fighting and the terrible fires had been too much for many people, not just the homeless. They trekked out to neighbouring villages where they were touched by the generosity of strangers welcoming them into their homes. The flames and smoke from the city could be seen from a great distance.
That night Field Marshal Montgomery sent a characteristically confident signal to General Eisenhower: ‘My appreciation of the situation in the MARKET area is that things are going to work out all right . . . The British airborne division at Arnhem has been having a bad time but their situation should be eased now that we can advance northwards from Nijmegen to their support. There is a sporting chance that we should capture the bridge at Arnhem which is at present held by the Germans and is intact.’