Although resistance at the road bridge in Arnhem had come to an end the evening before, some groups had still not given in. Lieutenant Barnett’s defence platoon was determined to fight on. Trapped in a burning building, they knew that their only chance was to break out through the back, where Germans were waiting for them. ‘I took a dozen or so [men],’ Barnett recounted, ‘and told them to fix their bayonets and we charged them. They were in a back garden and they got up and ran before we reached them. We were shouting “Whoa Mahomet!’ and I think we scared more of them to death than we actually killed with bullets.’ They made their way down towards the river to pass under the bridge, but suddenly they saw the unmistakable silhouette of a Tiger tank. They froze at the sight, and it took them a little time before they worked out that it had been knocked out and abandoned. It was the one from Panzer-Kompanie Hummel. They spent the rest of the night concealed under the bridge, as German patrols searched for survivors.
On hearing Major Gough’s order to break out towards Oosterbeek, the American OSS officer Lieutenant Todd had made a run for it with a small group. In the confusion and smoke, he managed to get out of the battle area. On finding himself alone he climbed a tree which had somehow escaped the conflagration, and strapped himself to a branch. A very uncomfortable night did little more than preserve his freedom until the next morning, when he was spotted.
Panzergrenadiers combed the battlefield. ‘It was terrible,’ wrote Horst Weber. ‘The trenches were full of bodies. There were bodies everywhere.’ Weber then discovered two British paratroopers playing dead. ‘Going past two bodies I turned around to glance at them casually – and I met their eyes. I covered them with my pistol, and smiling I said to them “Good morning, gentlemen. Shall I bring you your breakfast now?”’ He escorted them up to the church. Outside, weapons had been dropped in a pile. He watched his prisoners carefully because after the ferocious defence he could not rule out the possibility that they might grab one.
Lance Corporal John Smith, a brigade signaller, had been in another group trying to break out but they ran into a detachment of SS and were marched off. They were held in something like a church hall, which had a piano on the stage. One of the paratroopers could not resist going up and started playing jazz on it. The German guards, in a good mood after their victory, roared with laughter.
One paratrooper, who had remained in the slit trenches behind brigade headquarters during the night, recorded how they were mortared and had to fight off several counter-attacks. ‘We had by late morning been reduced to small groups and had been given orders by one of our officers that it was now every man for himself.’ He and three others decided to head for the St Elisabeth Hospital, dodging from house to house. They had two Sten guns and a handful of bullets left between them. They hid in an office, but were soon discovered by one of the many German patrols searching for survivors. ‘Within half an hour we were rejoining a considerable number of our compatriots, having our hands shaken by SS troops, and sharing their cigarettes. Many of these SS men we found, we had fought in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. I myself was most surprised to find that they were still under the impression that they would win the war – how can one argue with a fanatic?’ A number of SS also adopted what one paratrooper called their ‘usual “We-should-be-on-the-same-side” gambit’, arguing that the British should join them in the fight against the Soviet hordes.
A paratrooper from Lewis’s company of the 3rd Battalion was surprised to find that the young German soldier searching him was trembling. Many more panzergrenadiers, however, were in an expansive mood. Some handed out the chocolate taken from British parachute containers which they had collected. ‘Occasionally, one would stop and pat a British soldier on the shoulder and offer his congratulations. “Nice fight, Tommy.”’ A German officer asked a sapper where he had been fighting before. Following regulations, he refused to answer. In a perfect English accent, the officer replied, ‘Never mind, you are a very brave man, but also very foolish.’
Another German officer hit one of his soldiers for sneering at the British prisoners. Victory at Arnhem gave the Waffen-SS the opportunity to show how ritterlich – how chivalrous – they could be. At the collecting point, after they had dropped their weapons, Major Gough passed the word that all prisoners were to put on a good show when they set off. So they fell in smartly, dressed by the right and marched with their heads high. One group let rip with a final ‘Whoa Mahomet!’
The panzergrenadier Rottenführer Alfred Ringsdorf reflected on what they had just been through. ‘No one who has lived through such a terrible experience, whose life has hung by a thread, can tell me that he was not afraid. I don’t care if he has the Knight’s Cross with diamonds, I am sure he was afraid.’ After the battle at the bridge, those in the company who had survived were assembled in a park on the edge of Arnhem. ‘It was when we were gathered all together that I consciously heard a bird singing. It was like coming back to life, as if during the battle I had been living in suspension. I was suddenly alive again and realized that I had come through it alive.’
Horst Weber from the same 21st SS Panzergrenadier-Regiment wrote, ‘When the English came out after having surrendered they came out holding their heads high. They looked proud and not at all defeated. But I felt sorry for them because they looked so worn, haggard and exhausted. When it was clear that we had defeated the English, the first thing we thought about was getting hold of their food supplies and cigarettes. I was so intent on getting a share of the loot that I refused to help an English soldier whose legs had been shot away. He was propped against a wall and helpless to do anything.’ Weber described how as seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who ‘were always hungry’ he and his comrades could not believe the rations, the first-aid kits, the instant coffee and all the luxuries which they found in parachute containers. ‘And there was soap,’ Weber recorded, ‘something we had not seen for years. We had been washing with sand. We all wanted to grab these things and take some home with us. We were war children, only interested in what we could get.’ They were particularly impressed by sulfa powder. ‘In our army many soldiers died of gangrene because we had no penicillin.’
Some of Weber’s comrades were not above taking items of enemy uniform from the dead. Even in the usually well-equipped Waffen-SS, there could be a mixture of uniforms. Some wore the tiger camouflage smocks, some field grey, and many wore British or American trousers because they were far more resilient than the German issue, which fell to pieces. American paratrooper boots were the most highly prized, but any German captured wearing a pair was likely to be shot on the spot. Allied matériel had become such a preoccupation, even at the highest levels, that Model’s chief of staff soon issued an order forbidding troops in a strong position to shoot down gliders. ‘They carry valuable booty, especially heavy weapons, motor vehicles and motorcycles.’
As soon as the resistance from Frost’s men had ceased, the Kampfgruppe Knaust and the panzergrenadiers from the 10th SS Frundsberg were ordered south to strengthen the line around Elst. According to Knaust, some of Gräbner’s men from the Hohenstaufen reconnaissance battalion were found badly wounded, but still just alive, in the half-tracks which had been shot up on the bridge three days before. Several suffered from terrible burns. Ringsdorf also described going to Elst that morning in half-tracks. ‘We went over the bridge on which lay burned-out vehicles. The drivers were still inside. They were burned and charred black.’
Knaust’s reaction on seeing the terrain of the Betuwe, or the Island, was the same as General Adair’s. It was impossible country for tanks, with waterlogged polder on either side of the raised road. His Kampfgruppe’s panzer company was soon greatly strengthened with Royal Tigers and some Panthers – Knaust estimated some forty-five altogether. His battalion was also reinforced by a naval battalion of sailors from cruisers and U-boats – ‘they were terrific men, most of them NCOs, but unfortunately had absolutely no idea how to fight on land. As for the so-called Luftwaffe Field Battalion, it reported to me in Elst at twilight. It was my first and only glimpse of this battalion. By dawn it had disappeared.’ Knaust stayed awake on Pervitin, the German army’s methamphetamine pills.
Bittrich visited Knaust that day. ‘Another 24 hours,’ Bittrich said to him, ‘we need another 24 hours.’ He emphasized that they must not let the British through as he had yet to eliminate the 1st Airborne at Oosterbeek. Only then could they switch the bulk of II Panzer Corps south. Knaust, the experienced panzer commander, sited each tank himself. Instead of stomping around on his crutches, the one-legged commander travelled around in a motorcycle sidecar, which was far more manoeuvrable and presented a smaller target in the event of air attack.
Bittrich had placed the newly arrived SS Nederland battalion between the bridge and Arnhem railway station, as a backstop behind the Knaust Kampfgruppe. Führer headquarters in East Prussia still feared that Montgomery might break through, with sheer weight of tank numbers. Bittrich was under pressure from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) to eliminate the remains of the 1st Airborne at Oosterbeek as rapidly as possible. Hitler demanded a swift conclusion to that battle so that a major counter-attack could be launched towards Nijmegen. They believed that the British at Oosterbeek must be almost out of ammunition, and since ‘there is no doubt that the German Luftwaffe controls the air space over Arnhem,’ supplies were not getting through. Resistance, they deduced, would therefore be very short-lived.
Bittrich had reported the night before that they had already taken 2,800 prisoners north of the Neder Rijn, and that General von Tettau’s left flank on the railway line east of Wolfheze had made contact with the right flank of Harzer’s Hohenstaufen, so the British were entirely surrounded. But all was not well within the so-called Division von Tettau, because of the furious rows its commander was having with SS-Obersturmbannführer Lippert. Bittrich therefore decided to give the Hohenstaufen command over all forces surrounding the 1st Airborne Division.
An hour before first light, British officers in the Oosterbeek perimeter blew whistles to wake men in their slit trenches ready for dawn stand-to. Some wag shouted out, ‘Off-side!’: a weak joke which still produced some much needed laughter. A couple of glider pilots who had slept through the whistle, awoke later with a shock to find a German lying by their trench. He had waited for them to wake so that he could give himself up. He was in his forties, and simply did not want to fight any more. Considering the perilous situation of those to whom he was surrendering, he must have been either uninformed or desperate. A private from the 1st Para Battalion was so exhausted that he fell asleep later during the battle. When he woke up he astonished one of his comrades who had assumed he was dead.
The attack did not develop until 08.00, with half an hour of heavy shelling and a mortar stonk before the infantry came in, supported with direct fire from flak batteries. The noise was overwhelming. ‘The only way Taffy and I could converse’, a private in the South Staffords recorded, ‘was to shout in each other’s ear.’ The machine-gun fire was so intense that Major Lonsdale had to visit his sector’s positions north of Oosterbeek church in a Bren-gun carrier. Lonsdale, according to Hackett’s chief clerk, was ‘a figure to inspire terror’, with one arm in a blood-soaked sling, another bloodstained bandage wrapped around his head and another large bandage around his leg.
‘Usual morning “hate” shortly after first light,’ Major Blackwood of the 11th Parachute Battalion wrote in his diary that day. ‘John Douglas and a mortar bomb reached the same spot simultaneously. Bunny Speake received the larger portion of a shell in his stomach and chest. This left Guy Blacklidge and myself as the only officers. An interesting day, mortared and shelled continually and the tanks gave us no respite. Our gun crews were magnificent and brewed up at least two Tigers. It was my misfortune to inhabit a trench some twenty yards to the flank of our 17 pounder which almost concussed my head off at every shot.’
Major Robert Cain of the South Staffords also distinguished himself again, having recovered overnight from the PIAT round which blew up in his face. ‘The next morning’, the citation for his Victoria Cross continued, ‘this officer drove off three more tanks by the fearless use of his PIAT, on each occasion leaving cover and taking up positions in open ground with complete disregard for his personal safety.’ Afterwards, Cain had to pull back to Oosterbeek church, with most of his men in the nearby laundry which its owner refused to leave.
The defenders were soon going to need every round of anti-tank ammunition. In the middle of the day, the 503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion reached Arnhem with forty-five Royal Tigers, along with another panzergrenadier battalion, the 171st Artillery Regiment from Zutphen and the SS-Landstorm Nederland of Dutch Nazi volunteers, which Bittrich placed behind the Arnhem bridge.
The south-western part of the perimeter manned by the Border Regiment was the principal objective for General von Tettau’s forces. Three platoons had been sent forward to defend the steep hill at Westerbouwing which overlooked the Neder Rijn and the ferry across to Driel. It had a café on its summit to enjoy the scenic view over the river and the Betuwe beyond. The hill was of great importance, but the Border battalion could spare no more men to defend it.
At 08.00 that morning, the Worrowski battalion of the Hermann Göring Division’s Unteroffizier Schule attacked, supported by a few antiquated Renault tanks captured in 1940. The battle was fierce. The platoons were pushed off. B Company then counter-attacked, but suffered such losses that it had to pull back to the gasworks along the riverbank. One private with a PIAT managed to knock out three of the four tanks.
B Company had clearly put up a courageous fight against a greatly superior force. ‘There seemed to be hundreds of them,’ a lance corporal recorded, ‘like a football crowd. We opened up with everything.’ Oberstleutnant Fullriede recorded in his diary that ‘the Worrowski battalion during the attack on Oosterbeek lost all its officers except for a lieutenant, and half of its men.’ Fullriede, who belonged to the Hermann Göring Division, was appalled by the casualties caused when sending barely trained scratch units into action. ‘Despite the OKH’s ban’, he wrote of the army high command, ‘some 1,600 recruits were sent back to Germany, as their deployment would simply turn into child murder.’
The remnants of B Company retreated to the large white house of Dennennoord, which belonged to Jonkheer Bonifacius de Jonge, a former governor-general of the Dutch East Indies who had retired to Oosterbeek for its famed peace and quiet. He tried to be philosophical when his tennis court was ruined by shellfire and the whole house shook. And the water shortage meant that they had to fill buckets at a well in the neighbouring farm, which was extremely dangerous. He recorded in his diary that day how twelve wounded men appeared and were given something to eat in the kitchen. ‘They wanted to give themselves up as they had hardly any ammunition left. I then told them that this was impossible for as long as they had even one round left. An officer came to see what was happening, and thank God, took them with him. But an hour later they were back again. There is no leadership and cohesion. The situation is more than precarious. Parachutists are being dropped with the idea that they can look after themselves for three days, but then the Army has to come to relieve them, and that Army has not come. The house is still standing, but that is all one can say.’ The lawns around the house were then ruined with slit trenches and weapons pits, and the wounded were moved into Jonkheer de Jonge’s wine cellar.
D Company of the Border Regiment, halfway between the river and the Utrechtseweg, was also hard hit during that first major attack on the perimeter. It was heavily mortared throughout the day, causing many casualties from tree bursts. And in the fairly dense woods around, troops from SS Kampfgruppe Eberwein managed to infiltrate this extended line without too much difficulty. It was one thing to fight off troops attacking head-on, but constant harassing fire from behind as well was not good for morale. Since the company was close to a small hamlet and unable to send back wounded for treatment, the medical orderly and some courageous local inhabitants cared for them in their houses.
The 7th King’s Own Scottish Borderers, another battalion from Hicks’s airlanding brigade, also prepared to defend their White House on the northern tip of the perimeter, the Hotel Dreijeroord. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Payton-Reid, described ‘the eerie atmosphere of a haunted house. The moon shone through shot-holes in the walls, casting weird shadows, prowling footsteps could be heard on every enemy side and one felt that faces were peering through every window.’ Trees all around had been shredded by shrapnel. A huge chestnut tree had been brought down, and the hotel was surrounded by shattered roof tiles from the firing. Shredded curtains flapped in the wind ‘like ghosts’.
The ‘Battle of the White House’ began at dawn with German snipers who had tied themselves to trunks of trees high in the branches. All positions came under heavy Nebelwerfer fire, the six-barrelled mortar sometimes known by the British as the ‘moaning minnie’ because the noise it made was like a braying scream. Loudspeaker vans broadcast messages claiming that Montgomery had forgotten them and that, as they were surrounded, they should surrender.
The main attack began that afternoon. The Kampfgruppe Krafft advanced behind an intense mortar barrage, but when the moment came for them to charge, ‘Everything opened up,’ Colonel Payton-Reid recorded. ‘Riflemen and Bren gunners vied with each other in production of rapid fire; mortars, their barrels practically vertical, lobbed bombs over our heads at the minimum possible range, anti-tank guns defended our flanks and Vickers machine-guns belched forth streams of bullets as only Vickers can. The consequent din was reinforced by a stream of vindictive utterances in a predominantly Scottish accent.’ German survivors went to ground, but they were cleared when ‘we went for them with the bayonet in the good old-fashioned style, with more blood-curdling yells.’
The Borderers, although reduced to just 270 men, managed to inflict massive casualties on their attackers. Their regimental history records how Headquarters Company and D Company were hotly engaged. ‘Major Cochrane and Drum Major Tait with Bren guns, and Provost Sergeant Graham with a Vickers machine-gun killed dozens of Germans.’ Little quarter was given or expected. Apparently, ‘Major Gordon Sherriff, when accompanying the commanding officer on a tour of the 7th KOSB positions, met a German and killed him with his hands.’ A Company was overrun, and the rest of the battalion was forced back, but the ground was retaken in a wild bayonet charge. By then no company commanders were left, and only a single wounded sergeant major remained on his feet.
That night Major General Urquhart ordered the Borderers back to a block of houses just a few hundred metres north of the Hartenstein. The new positions turned into a suburban battlefield in which self-propelled assault guns would dominate the street, and house-to-house fighting became savagely intimate. British soldiers claimed that they could tell if Germans were present purely from the smell of stale tobacco.
Part of the reconnaissance squadron attached to the remnants of the 156th Para Battalion came under pressure around midday. ‘We got our first sight of Jerry infantry on the move,’ Lieutenant John Stevenson wrote in his diary. ‘They were going in and out of the houses on the other side of the crossroads towards a bakery which was the largest house in our defensive area. As fast as they came, we knocked them down. We had three men and a machine-gun in the bakery. [The Germans] set it on fire with incendiary bullets and our chaps had to get out. We were uncertain whether [the Germans] had got into the bakery themselves, and as the building dominated our other positions, we thought it best to knock it down completely. We turned the PIAT on it from fifty yards range which knocked a great hole in the wall and must have made things most uncomfortable for anyone inside. We made sure by patrolling to the house and lobbing grenades into what was left of it until we were quite sure there was no one there. They more or less left us alone for the rest of that day, leaving behind their dead and wounded. By then we had killed a lot of Jerries.’
The perimeter’s defenders were not just drooping on their feet from exhaustion, they were short of ammunition and desperately hungry. The American air support officer Lieutenant Paul Johnson reported that ‘the rations were running low so we decided to cut down and make what was left last as long as possible.’ But his group was better off than most as they still had their Jeeps, which had been well stocked.
The key problem came from the supply containers dropping outside the perimeter, because the lack of radio contact meant that the RAF did not have a clear idea of the defended area. Smoke from the fighting obscured the coloured panels, and it was no good firing Very lights or setting off smoke grenades because the Germans were doing the same, having captured the plans which revealed all the signals. And when containers were retrieved, they often lacked food. ‘Resupply has come in,’ wrote Corporal George Cosadinos, ‘but the majority dropped in the wrong place. All we received were 6 pounder [anti-tank] shells. You can’t eat them!’ Even greater fury was provoked by containers, filled not with food or ammunition, but with maroon berets, battledress, belts and even blanco.
Other units were longing for 6-pounder shells, but they would probably receive 17-pounder shells after their 17-pounder had been knocked out. The Germans, on the other hand, seemed to suffer no shortage of ammunition. Thanks to Model’s organization, it came all the way to each unit in the same trucks which brought it to the Netherlands. Lieutenant Johnson observed that when the defenders opened fire, ‘almost immediately the Germans came back with their mortars working over the area thoroughly.’
Everyone’s attention was on the sky when the RAF supply planes approached, and many admitted to having their heart in their mouth, imagining the bravery required to keep the plane on course through the fire from the surrounding flak batteries. ‘My eye caught one of the burning Dakotas,’ wrote Lance Bombardier Jones. ‘For the briefest second two figures appeared at the doorway. One had a chute and the other didn’t and they were jumping on the one chute. As they came out of the doorway, they parted. The one floated down in his chute; the other fell to earth like a stone. I can still picture him falling, his arms akimbo, diving head first towards the ground.’ Despite the loss in aircraft, the supply drop on 21 September proved to be more successful than most, and certainly a lot more than on subsequent days. The Light Regiment Royal Artillery had been down to less than thirty rounds per gun, and its effectiveness was saved by that day’s delivery of nearly 700 rounds of 75mm shells for the howitzers.
With impressive self-control on the part of finders, a large proportion of the parachuted rations was handed over for the wounded. While German soldiers exulted in their booty from above, and often tormented their adversaries with the fact, a few British soldiers were so hungry that sometimes they unwisely cooked chickens or rabbits without gutting them. They had no compunction about searching the pockets and pouches of the dead, whether German or British, to see if they contained any rations. Breakfast for the lucky ones consisted of half an oatmeal block, crumbled into water to make porridge. Most of their food came from vegetable gardens and orchards, and many paratroopers suffered from diarrhoea from eating unripe pears and apples. Those away from the Hartenstein had to rely on the store cupboards of generous households. British soldiers were often too shaken to take in how little the average Dutch family had survived on during the occupation. And this was to become far more serious after the battle. The only item which still seemed to exist in reasonable quantities was tea leaves. The soldiers handed them over to the family of the house they were defending, and the owners would make pots of tea for everyone. But there was almost no milk available, and the water shortage was becoming acute.
The desperation for tea was so great that some soldiers would do almost anything to obtain more. Lieutenant Jeffrey Noble’s batman, Private McCarthy, went out under German fire, searching one container after another. He finally managed to find a box, and ran back to be cursed by Noble for taking such risks, but no doubt he was a hero to his comrades.
As well as tea, the British gave their Dutch hosts cigarettes, sweets and chocolate in addition to bully beef and sardines from parachute containers. Having been rather too generous with cigarettes at the beginning, they then had to ask for the odd one back. They were also surprised to find that in Oosterbeek many people grew their own tobacco. But the British had much to be grateful for, especially the way civilians cared for their wounded, and even just the exhausted. One husband noted that when some tired and dirty paratroopers arrived in their cellar and there was no water, ‘my wife cleans their faces with eau de cologne.’
Some Dutch boys would slip through German positions to deliver apples and vegetables. Others, excited by the danger, took crazy risks to obtain supplies, from British containers and even from German sources. Lucianus Vroemen and a friend came across an unoccupied half-track. They discovered cans of sardines, some bottles of French wine and packs of pale Hungarian tobacco. They wondered whether to take a pistol as well, but decided against it. They were intrigued rather than shocked by the dead German soldiers whose pockets they searched. When they handed their booty over, British paratroopers begged them not to be so reckless.
Feeding the hundreds of wounded became an increasingly difficult task. Near the Tafelberg, four sheep were spotted wandering around. Jan Donderwinkel, a local volunteer helper, noted that they were promptly shot, skinned, butchered and turned into stew. Also caring for the patients was becoming increasingly difficult in the midst of a battlefield. No more surgery could be performed for the moment at the Tafelberg as the ceilings had been brought down by shellfire, in both the offices used as operating theatres.
Part of Hackett’s 4th Parachute Brigade managed to push the Germans out of the Hotel Schoonoord. The shortage of water had made life almost impossible for the nurses, who could not now wash the bodies of the wounded, and the medical staff could not wash their hands. They were so short of field dressings and bandages or gauze that volunteers went from house to house with baskets begging for sheets which could be cut up as bandages. In some cases the medical staff even resorted to taking them off the dead for reuse, yet more and more wounded were arriving every hour.
‘The noise of battle became distinctly unpleasant’, the padre of the Glider Pilot Regiment reported from the improvised hospital. He came across ‘a lad who physically was unharmed, but mentally badly shocked’.
‘Padre, I’m cold,’ the boy said. ‘Can you get me another blanket?’ He explained that there were none spare because many of the wounded did not have one. The boy asked to be tucked in, and begged him to say a prayer. ‘I get frightened with all the noise.’ The sound of battle continued in the surrounding streets. Having apparently succeeded in calming him, the padre continued on his rounds. Next morning, not finding the boy, Padre Pare asked where he was. ‘He died two hours after you left him,’ came the reply. ‘It was the noise outside.’
Padre Pare continued in his attempts to comfort the disturbed or take down messages to mothers or loved ones. He had to try to sound optimistic, however bleak the outlook. Colonel Warrack reported that the wounded were ‘pathetically anxious for news of XXX Corps’.
On the Marienbergweg on the eastern side of Oosterbeek, SS soldiers shot a young Dutch woman trying to help a wounded English paratrooper, but fortunately they failed to kill her. She was brought to the Schoonoord with a badly smashed arm. Yet firing stopped when orderlies carrying stretcher cases appeared to cross the road from the Schoonoord to the Vreewijk. At one point during the fighting, a medical orderly saw an old Dutchman walk along the road from Oosterbeek station. ‘When he reached the crossroads, he looked to the right and left, put up his umbrella, and calmly walked across the street and disappeared in the direction of the Tafelberg Hotel.’
While the Schoonoord, the Tafelberg, the Vreewijk and the ter Horst house down by the church became ever more battered and squalid, medical services in the field often reeked of earlier wars. Arie Italiaander, a Dutch commando attached to the reconnaissance squadron, found himself having to act as surgeon after a mortar round exploded by the Hotel Hartenstein. ‘The wounded man’s foot had almost been torn off,’ and Italiaander, who had a good knife, was asked to cut it off completely, which he did. ‘The wounded man, who’d been given a morphine injection and was smoking a cigarette, smiled bravely.’ The Germans, who could see what was going on, held their fire. Later, Italiaander buried the boot, with the foot inside, somewhere near his trench.
In theory, every man given morphine was supposed to have the dose marked in indelible blue ink on his forehead. When they ran out of morphine, they did not tell the wounded. Instead the medical orderly would say: ‘What would you be wanting morphia for? Morphia’s for people who are really hurt. You’re not.’ The 1st Airborne did receive one fresh consignment towards the end of the battle. A Mosquito fighter-bomber came in very low and dropped morphine supplies wrapped in blankets.
With German and British wounded lying side by side in the improvised hospitals, the hostility of the battlefield often gave way to the shared humanity of suffering. Sapper Tim Hicks had been shot in the neck. His body felt numb and he feared that he had been paralysed, but to his relief the pain came and he sensed he would walk again. His comrades took him to an aid station for the wounded. ‘There was a soldier lying next to me,’ he wrote. ‘I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him. He was moaning and crying. We got shelled and he reached over and took my hand and squeezed it. He seemed to get quieter then and it gave me a sense of comfort too. In the morning I looked over and saw he was German. He was young, about my age, 21 or 22. He had a terrible wound in his right side. He was conscious and when he saw me looking at him, he smiled and mumbled something. I shared what water I had in my water bottle with him.’*
Even the St Elisabeth Hospital, under German control, had no water. So to clean up the place, which was spattered with blood, Sister van Dijk organized a column of nursing staff and volunteers to proceed under Red Cross flags to the riverbank to fill buckets and other containers with water. They were never fired at, but they had to pick their way through the dead. ‘There were men lying everywhere – British and German. On the ground were arms and legs without men and we had to be very careful not to step on grenades.’
The regimental aid post of the Light Regiment in the ter Horst rectory down by Oosterbeek church was in a far worse state. The house was smashed by shellfire, and they had nearly a hundred cases with just a single doctor, Captain Martin. That day a German tank opened fire on the house. ‘A shell blew in one of the walls of the room with stretcher cases,’ an orderly wrote. ‘Bricks and wood covered the men. Captain Martin and I began uncovering them. There was another explosion and everything went black. Five stretcher cases were killed by the second blast. Captain Martin was wounded in both legs.’ Martin, having patched himself up, carried on.
General Urquhart, on a morning tour of the sector with Colonel Loder-Symonds, was shaken by the number of corpses piled in the garden. He told Colonel Thompson of the Light Regiment to see that they were buried, because it was ‘bad for morale’.
Urquhart, Loder-Symonds and Thompson then entered the cramped battery command post in the back of the laundry. At 09.35 hours, the forward observation officer there had broken into the radio net of an unidentified British unit, saying ‘we are the people you have been trying to meet’. He was ordered off, but he persisted. ‘We are being heavily shelled and mortared. Can you help us?’ Using veiled speech, the two officers cautiously began an identification process, well aware of German attempts to cause mischief.
The forward observation officer handed the microphone and headset to Loder-Symonds. He identified himself, with ‘This is Sunray,’ the standard code for a commander. To move the process forward, he said that his first name was Robert. He was then asked to identify a mutual friend. This he did, and with great satisfaction, he turned to Urquhart to announce that they had now made contact with 64th Medium Regiment, with the 43rd Division. Not only were they now at last in touch with XXX Corps, they could call up fire support from Nijmegen. ‘The tense atmosphere in the command post relaxed in a sense of elation,’ Thompson noted.
The 64th Medium Regiment had driven through the night from the Belgian frontier to Nijmegen. Within an hour of their first contact with the forward observation officer in Oosterbeek, one of their troops was ready to fire its 4.5-inch guns on one of the three targets they had been given. Fire mission followed fire mission throughout the day, and by 16.00 the regiment was augmented with a battery of 155mm ‘Long Tom’ howitzers. Even though the range was fifteen kilometres, 1st Airborne recorded that they were firing with ‘uncanny accuracy’, even at German breakthroughs into the perimeter. The American Paul Johnson of the air support party, who admitted their failure to help the airborne division, described how the Light Regiment’s forward observation officers ‘were able to adjust the fire of some of the XXX Corps 155mm. guns. They managed to knock out two assault guns and damage a third thus saving the southeast flank from a dangerous attack.’
The other advantage for the Light Regiment came later in the afternoon. While the Polish Independent Parachute Brigade was dropping near Driel, every German gun was firing in its direction. This finally gave the gunners at Oosterbeek the chance to bring up ammunition, improve their gun pits and fling out all their empty shell cases.
Any lull in the firing that day was a relief for the civilians still trapped in their cellars in Oosterbeek. During the bombardments, parents sometimes made their children wear saucepans on their heads like helmets. Such lulls would also provide relief from children crying and even the opportunity to go upstairs and stretch cramped legs, with up to twenty-five people sheltering in a single house. Some would slip out to find out which houses were still standing and who was still alive. A few more families would seize the opportunity to flee, taking the old and infirm with them, often sitting them on cushions in a wheelbarrow. A few old people simply refused to move. Lieutenant Michael Dauncey of the Glider Pilot Regiment was checking out a house that day, to see whether they should turn it into a strongpoint. He went upstairs to examine the rooms, and opened a door. There, sitting up in a large bed, was an old lady wearing a bed jacket. They bowed and smiled to each other, and Dauncey withdrew, closing the door. He never knew what happened to her as the battle intensified.
The real danger to civilians during the battles came from SS panzergrenadiers, clearing houses by throwing grenades down into the cellar. An unexpected danger was children playing with unexploded ordnance. A sergeant witnessed one soldier approaching a child who was holding a grenade with the pin out. He managed to take it off him, but lost his own hand as a result.
Wounds were totally unpredictable, especially during one of the frequent mortar stonks that day. One person recorded eighteen mortar bursts in a single minute at one point. The American Lieutenant Bruce Davis was hit in the feet by shards from an explosion, just as he was diving head first into a foxhole near the Hartenstein. Having little to do once the pieces of metal had been removed, he limped around during lulls trying to raise morale with rumours of XXX Corps arriving. ‘I think I must have promised them an armored division for breakfast four days in a row,’ he reported later.
Davis was above all interested in the enemy. He observed that the SS were prepared to attack, but ordinary German infantrymen were scared of the red berets ‘and would not attack without the help of armor or self-propelled guns’. As an indication of German nervousness, he noted a thirty-second burst of fire from an MG-42 machine gun. The fact that German machine-gunners were firing such long bursts, from five seconds all the way up thirty, indicated how frightened they were, he wrote in his report. ‘There was constant evidence that the British infantry had given Jerry the scare of his life. And the amazing thing about the British infantry was that they carried on with the light-hearted abandon of a Sunday school class on the first spring picnic.’
While many had been in tears when the supply planes came over and the pilots demonstrated such incredible courage, death was so commonplace that almost everyone became callous. On the eastern flank just north of the Utrechtseweg, a group of glider pilots playing cribbage would stop from time to time between hands so that one of their number could pick off a German soldier.
The loudspeaker van returned to the northern part of the perimeter, again playing Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’, before switching to appeals to lay down their arms. This was rapidly followed by ‘the shouting of the German Jews in the 21st [Independent Parachute Company] urging them “to go fuck yourselves” in German’. But their hatred at times became irrational and uncontrollable. A pathfinder sergeant recorded how a large group of Germans emerged from the woods waving white handkerchiefs. A German Jew in Sergeant Sullivan’s platoon shouted out in German, ‘Who are you?’
‘Signalmen,’ they answered.
‘Come here.’
Halfway to the British lines, the paratroopers opened fire, slaughtering the entire section.*
Another pathfinder noted that evening in his diary, ‘Can hear our own artillery on the other side of the river very plainly now. Hope they hurry up and join up with us, for we can’t hold out much longer.’ And Major Blackwood with 11 Para wrote, ‘XXX Corps of Second Army should have reached us by yesterday, but at least we have contacted them by wireless. Their mediums are giving us noble support, this afternoon breaking up a strong enemy counter attack before it was properly launched. By dusk our sole remaining anti-tank gun was knocked out and a bloody Tiger was still whining around just over the crest. We waited for it with 82 grenades, but it did not come in, and glad we were when a Polish anti-tank gun and crew appeared and dug in among us. The remnants of 1st Airborne Division, as far as we can make out, are now holding a box some one and a half miles square, with Jerry on three sides and the Rhine on the fourth.’