American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne and British armoured regiments defending Hell’s Highway would remember 22 September as Black Friday. This was the start of three days of relentless German attacks on the route. ‘At one point,’ wrote a captain in the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, ‘the men were so weary that [on] the order to rest, [they] fell almost as one to the ground without even attempting to remove their packs, falling immediately into deep slumber.’
The principal German objective was still Veghel, which Generaloberst Student had identified as the best choke point on the XXX Corps route. Colonel Johnson in Veghel soon realized that his regimental attack on Schijndel had been ill timed. During the morning of 22 September, there was some desultory shooting in Schijndel by a few Germans stranded in the town and ‘a vigorous house-to-house rat-hunting campaign’ by Kinnard’s battalion killed fifteen of them. The real threat was heading for Veghel.
At 09.30 that morning, Generalfeldmarschall Model had sent an order demanding that ‘Today’s attack must definitely cut off the enemy’s route of advance.’ He also called for the 245th and the 712th Infanterie divisions to be brought up as soon as possible. ‘Make my left flank strong!’ From the west, three battalions of Kampfgruppe Huber from the 59th Division, supported by five Panther tanks and artillery, was advancing ‘to take the canal bridge west of Veghel and blow it up’. Meanwhile from the east, General von Obstfelder had sent Kampfgruppe Heinke and the 107th Panzer-Brigade from north of Helmond.
As soon as the danger became evident Johnson contacted Major General Taylor, who had moved the 101st Airborne’s divisional command post to the Kasteel Henkenshage on the edge of St Oedenrode. Unlike at Son, this command post was now well defended with the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment and the 377th Parachute Field Artillery. Taylor had already sent Johnson a squadron of the 44th Royal Tank Regiment, and now promised to send some British self-propelled artillery.
While Kampfgruppe Walther and the 107th Panzer-Brigade advanced from the east, the German encircling attack from the west cut Hell’s Highway between Veghel and Uden. This forced General Adair in Nijmegen to send back the 32nd Guards Brigade to reopen it. The 2nd Battalion of the 506th, including Major Winters’s Easy Company, reached Uden just in time with a couple of British tanks. A furious attack on the first German patrol to approach Uden gave the impression that the town was strongly held. The German counter-attack caused panic in Veghel. Inhabitants tried to crowd into the hospital for safety. ‘At one moment many hundreds of people, scared and hysterical, were crowding outside the main door, waiting to be let in,’ Dr Schrijvers recorded. He had to address them and advise them to go back to their own cellars. The hospital’s basement was being used to shelter the wounded.
The British tanks supporting Kinnard’s battalion at Schijndel had been recalled in haste to Veghel, where Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe (who later led the defence of Bastogne in the Ardennes) took command. Lieutenant Colonel Julian Ewell’s 3rd Battalion was brought back to Eerde ready to support the tanks. He was able to hand his 150 prisoners over to the Dutch underground, whose members guarded them with captured German weapons. Kinnard left wounded prisoners in the care of their German doctors, well aware that they would be reincorporated into the Wehrmacht, but he had little choice in the circumstances. He gave the underground the German vehicles they had captured, all except a well-stocked mobile field kitchen. This black cooker on wheels with a chimney was popularly known as a ‘Gulaschkanone’. Kinnard also armed members of the underground with German rifles and machine pistols and asked them to escort his 250 prisoners back to Veghel, while his battalion established a defence line along some sand dunes south-west of Eerde.
Johnson had only a single battalion and the 377th Parachute Field Artillery in Veghel as the attack began at 10.30. He was fortunate that part of Colonel Sink’s 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was within striking distance, and the 321st Glider Field Artillery took up position by the canal to engage the Panther tanks over open sights. Another squadron of British tanks and the self-propelled artillery sent by General Taylor also arrived just in time to make a difference.
Even in the midst of the furious fighting, a Dutch family asked Pfc John Cipolla to join them for dinner. He could not resist the invitation to a table laid with a tablecloth. Just after they had sat down, his Top Sergeant glanced in as he passed the window, carried on a couple of paces, did a double-take and then dashed back to yell at him that he should get his butt outside where he belonged. Cipolla grabbed a chicken leg and his rifle, thanked the family and ran for the door.
By mid-afternoon, it was clear that the Germans would not be able to destroy the bridge at Veghel. At 16.30, Student informed Model’s headquarters that the 59th Division had been within a thousand metres of it. The Germans did manage to blow the bridge over the Zuid Willems Canal, but Kampfgruppe Huber was encircled and almost destroyed in the battle. When Colonel Sink told McAuliffe that they had wiped out a German attack, killing 140 of them, McAuliffe retorted: ‘You’re exaggerating.’ Sink insisted that he come and count the bodies.
One paratrooper lieutenant who had been wounded during the attack on Veghel admitted later, ‘I was afraid that if the Germans captured our aid station, they would shoot me, as some of my men had done to the Germans in Normandy.’ A sergeant later acknowledged that only their padre, Father Sampson, had managed to stop him from committing murder in Veghel, when he came across a badly wounded German soldier. ‘I had hoped many times if I was ever like this, some German soldier would put a bullet in my brains and end it for me. I was about to do this for the poor devil when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Father Sampson. He prevented me from doing this for which I have been thankful.’
As the Germans started to withdraw, General Taylor called the 2nd Tactical Air Force. They sent in a large force of RAF rocket-firing Typhoons to engage the tanks. This prompted wild cheering from the paratroopers on the ground as they watched each aircraft peel off, roll and dive followed by the whoosh of the rockets. That day the deployment of the 107th Panzer-Brigade away from Helmond enabled VIII Corps, on the right of XXX Corps, to seize a bridgehead there with little loss. Confusion and bad communications had undermined the German attack. The chaos was such that, early in the morning, some officers in a staff car drove into Veghel thinking it was still in German hands and were shot or captured. Even a paymaster drove into the town before the battle started, an American officer reported, ‘with the idea of paying off the German garrison in the town, to find out to his sorrow that the garrison was in a PW cage down the street, so we just threw him in there. He was truly mad.’ Once the battle died down, the local restaurant did a brisk trade with famished soldiers, offering ham and eggs for 3 guilders, which was $1.10, or $15.30 in today’s money.
Major General Taylor may have been satisfied with the outcome at Veghel, but he was not pleased that ‘it required seven days to bring in all the elements of the 101st Airborne Division. During this time the Division was obliged to protect the landing field with considerable forces while carrying out ground missions. This reduced the strength available for the essential tasks of the Division.’ The 101st, he emphasized, only just held on to its twenty-four-kilometre sector. They were ‘weak at every critical point’ which required ‘the most energetic shifting of troops to meet the numerous threats as they developed along this long corridor’.
Death was doubly shocking when it came unexpectedly during peaceful moments. In Eerde, looking out of the window of a windmill after the battle for Veghel was over, Corporal Richard Klein observed to Jacob Wingard, the paratrooper beside him, that it seemed as if the Germans had conceded this particular area. A few moments later a shot hit Wingard. He knew it was fatal. He said ‘I’m dead’ three times, then died.
While the 101st was overstretched along its sector of Hell’s Highway, Gavin’s 82nd Airborne was still fighting off attacks from Meindl’s II Fallschirmjäger Corps. Gavin was also deeply dissatisfied with the length of time troop carrier command was taking to deliver his division. His 325th Glider Infantry Regiment had still not arrived. He too realized the need to keep a numerically superior enemy off balance by constant attacks. The Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry began its association with the 82nd that day, supporting the 3rd Battalion of the 508th in a reconnaissance in force towards Wercheren, north-east of Beek.
Gavin’s intelligence staff were suffering from a lack of information on enemy strength, mainly because they had no prisoners to interrogate. Divisional headquarters had been sending out firm instructions that German prisoners must be captured for interrogation and not just shot. Battalion commanders became desperate for prisoners because demands for them from divisional headquarters increased. They even started offering expenses-paid trips to Paris to anybody who brought one in. A paratrooper in the Beek sector decided to have a go after consuming rather too much captured German Schnapps. ‘To the surprise of the troopers round him’, reported Captain Ferguson, ‘and before anyone could stop him, this trooper picks up his rifle, cocks his helmet on his head, and starts walking across the level Waal River flood plain towards the German lines some two to three hundred yards away. Everyone watched in amazement, including General Gavin, as this trooper walked across this open space in full view of the enemy up to a culvert and called for the “Krauts” to come out with their hands up. The surprised Germans, three or four, meekly came out, and with a little urging from the trooper, made their way to our lines. General Gavin met the trooper, still rather tipsy, and pinned the Silver Star on him.’*
Capturing prisoners for interrogation was often a far more dangerous activity. ‘On one patrol into Germany,’ a paratrooper recorded, ‘Lieutenant Megellas captured several Germans. The following night, our over-eager regimental staff ordered another patrol (different company) into the same area. As expected, the patrol was ambushed by a strong German force and suffered many killed and wounded. The lieutenant leading that patrol received multiple gunshot wounds and was crippled for life.’
In spite of their attacks from the Reichswald and against Hell’s Highway, the Germans were dismayed to find how rapidly British forces were building up in the Betuwe between the Waal and the Neder Rijn. At 10.30 Obergruppenführer Bittrich telephoned Model’s chief of staff Krebs to warn him that they were pushing in much greater strength up the Nijmegen–Arnhem railway line. He was having to send his last reserves into the battle south of Elst. Fifteen minutes later Krebs rang back with Model’s reply that ‘a link-up between the forces advancing from Nijmegen to Arnhem with the enemy west of Arnhem is to be prevented by every means.’ It was not entirely clear whether this meant the 1st Airborne north of the Rhine or the Polish brigade on the south side. Krebs was under great pressure that morning, for Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt was demanding to know when they were going to destroy the Nijmegen bridge. They could only answer that they intended to blow it up that night.
Major General Ivor Thomas’s 43rd Wessex Division was now taking over the main advance from the Guards Armoured Division on the Nijmegen–Arnhem axis, and also advancing north-west towards Driel. The night before, Brigadier Hubert Essame’s 214th Brigade had crossed the Waal by both the railway bridge and the road bridge. It would attack Oosterhout with the 7th Somerset Light Infantry and protect the left flank of the 129th Brigade, which was to attack the German defence line that ran from the main road to Ressen. It was manned by the Kampfgruppe Knaust with two infantry battalions, a machine-gun battalion, twenty 20mm light flak guns and, most decisive of all, two batteries of 88mm guns. But that night, after the loss of Oosterhout, Knaust would pull them back to Elst.
‘At first light under cover of the morning mist’, two troops of the Household Cavalry Regiment had slipped through the German forces around Oosterhout at half an hour’s interval. They headed on to Valburg to scout out the best route to Driel to make contact with Sosabowski’s Polish Parachute Brigade. They were followed later by the 5th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and B Squadron of the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards.
Early that morning in Oosterbeek, Major General Urquhart sent for his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Mackenzie. He told him to take Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Myers, their chief engineer officer, and cross the Neder Rijn. He was to go on to Nijmegen to see Browning and Horrocks in person, because Urquhart did not believe that they appreciated the gravity of the situation. ‘It is absolutely vital that they should know that the division, as such, no longer exists, and that we are merely a collection of individuals hanging on.’ Mackenzie was to make it clear that if supplies did not reach them in the course of the night to come, it might be too late. Myers was to accompany him, as he should advise on the crossing. This was the same Myers who had played such a central part in Special Operations Executive’s great coup, the blowing up of the Gorgopotamos railway viaduct in Greece in 1942.
Mackenzie and Myers set off in a Jeep carrying the rubber dinghy, but then had to seek shelter in the church at Oosterbeek because of heavy shelling. This delay meant that the river mist was breaking up by the time they reached the bank of the Neder Rijn. They could hear sounds of battle when they reached the far side, but there was no sign of the Polish reception party they had been told to expect.
Sosabowski, unable to do anything else, was making his men dig their slit trenches deeper in the orchards surrounding Driel. He wobbled around them on a woman’s bicycle, shouting ‘Deeper! Deeper!’ Some of his men called back asking if he had a driver’s licence.
It was about this time that 2nd Lieutenant Richard Tice was killed. Tice was an American volunteer of Polish extraction, who had joined the brigade despite hardly speaking the language. He was much liked by his men who referred to him as ‘the Cowboy’ because he looked so American. Tice had experienced a premonition of his death ‘before we even jumped’, one of his NCOs said. At about 15.00, a group of soldiers appeared a few hundred metres away. Some of the men saw they were Germans, but Tice was convinced they must be friendly. As they approached to within about 300 metres, a voice called, ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!’
‘Those are our boys, Americans!’ Tice rejoiced, but his men were not convinced. He allowed the line of soldiers to come closer. Suddenly they dropped to the ground and opened fire. Tice’s platoon fired back. He gave the order to his men ‘Retreat one by one towards the farm.’ He stayed behind with Corporal Gredecki and a light machine gun to cover them, but the gun was hit and put out of action. The two men, now vulnerable, ran back shooting behind them with their personal weapons. Tice threw himself down next to an apple tree to fire at the Germans with his Sten gun, but he was hit several times and died.
Some time later, when Sosabowski was visiting another of his companies, armoured vehicles were sighted. The Poles assumed they were German, but they turned out to be British Daimler armoured cars and White scout cars from the two troops of Household Cavalry commanded by Captain Wrottesley and Lieutenant Young. Mackenzie and Myers had arrived, so Young’s troop acted as a relay station to allow Mackenzie to speak to Horrocks’s chief of staff at XXX Corps. He passed on the message from Urquhart to Horrocks: ‘We are short of ammunition, men, food and medical supplies. DUKWs are essential, 2 or 3 would be sufficient.* If supplies do not arrive tonight it may be too late.’ Mackenzie insisted on a meeting with Browning in Nijmegen. Myers meanwhile warned Sosabowski that they had only rubber dinghies to ferry his men across the Neder Rijn.
The Household Cavalry as a reconnaissance force was supposed to avoid combat if possible, but when some German tanks were sighted Wrottesley and Young ‘had great difficulty in preventing the Poles somewhat naturally from taking over as tanks their armoured cars and scout cars’ as they were the only vehicles available. Sosabowski’s men had only PIATs, because their anti-tank guns were all north of the river. Once the tanks had moved away, Sosabowski then wanted to send patrols in all directions. A reply from General Horrocks was transmitted in answer to Urquhart’s message. ‘Everything possible will be done to get the essential through.’
Urquhart’s feelings of impatience can be easily imagined, with XXX Corps so near and yet so far. The curse of bad communications made everything worse. All he could hope to do was to try to maintain morale while waiting for Mackenzie to return with definite news. The Hotel Hartenstein was in a sorry state, with its roof shot to pieces and its walls riddled in all directions. Outside, every man needed to be within a jump of a slit trench. Fortunately, the trenches had a reasonably soft bottom as soldiers had padded them with parachutes. But ‘the great snag about mortars’, Major Blackwood observed, ‘is that the bomb arrives with no warning whistle.’
The other danger came from German snipers strapped in the tall beech trees. They waited for a soldier to make a dash to collect water and would take their shot. As soon as a sniper’s position was identified Bren gunners would blast him out of his tree. PIAT rounds were now too precious to be used. They had to be reserved for tanks and the self-propelled assault guns. One well-concealed German sniper had a macabre sense of humour. He was hidden high in some trees which overlooked the only well close to the Hartenstein. ‘He would allow us to approach the well,’ a glider pilot recorded, ‘usually through a hail of mortar bombs, and then solemnly shoot holes in the bucket as it appeared over the edge of the well. A true sadist!’
German mortar teams were impressively accurate because they always managed to avoid the hotel tennis courts, where their compatriots were held. The Germans caged there complained constantly about the lack of food, when in fact they were receiving no less than their captors. According to the American air controller Lieutenant Bruce Davis, a German major, a veteran of the First World War, addressed them in the following terms: ‘These men have stood up under the most terrible artillery bombardment I have ever seen. They have fought on without food and without sleep for several days. Even though they are our enemies, they are the bravest men I have ever seen. When you complain, you make me feel ashamed of being German. I suggest that you be quiet and follow their example.’
A corporal in the 1st Airborne Provost Company, who was guarding them, was amused when a lightly wounded German sergeant complained that he thought it unfair that the Americans should use .45 bullets, which were so much larger than the German 9mm. His lieutenant remarked that they had so many prisoners packed in, ‘it’s getting like bloody Wimbledon.’
Hunger and exhaustion after five days of fighting had its effect on the defenders. Members of the 21st Independent Company just to the north were so tired that they had not dug in the night before. ‘Found we’d been sleeping amongst a lot of Jerry graves, so it was a good job we didn’t dig in,’ a pathfinder observed. ‘Thank goodness Jerry likes his sleep and doesn’t worry us much during the night.’
That morning of Friday 22 September, Major Blackwood in the 11th Para Battalion started with the usual morning ‘hate’ of mortar bombardment. The only difference was that it was raining quite heavily. ‘The company was withdrawn to the reinforced concrete church for a much needed rest and an opportunity to eat and clean weapons. The mud plays hell with Sten working parts and our .45 automatics have proved useless, being far too susceptible to dirt and grit in the working parts. Managed some hot stew and tea and cleaned all magazines etc. About 1100 hrs we moved to the “comparatively quiet sector” of the western flank where, with some Borders, we dug in along the edge of a large park facing enemy held buildings some 400 yards away. As our [machine guns] were in position on our left we had little peace. Mortaring was incessant and extremely heavy and a Spandau had a periodic crack at us. We sat tight all day, beating off several infantry attacks, the casualties from which were in each instance collected by German stretcher parties under the charge of a very agitated and uneasy Hun who vigorously waved a large Red Cross [flag] and shouted repeatedly: “You no fire! Red Cross flag!” But Jerry himself is observing the rules of war rather well.’
Blackwood was summoned to an orders group by Brigadier Hicks. He was told to prepare an attack ‘across four hundred yards of perfectly flat and open ground, surmounting en route four 15 foot wire fences, entering and clearing three enemy held buildings, clearing an orchard some hundreds of yards long, attacking and clearing part of a village, and consolidating against inevitable counter-attack. This was rather a tall order as my force consisted of ten paratroopers, six glider men and two cooks.’ Fortunately for Blackwood and his men, the attack was then cancelled. He kept going on benzedrine tablets and a large bottle of Dutch brandy.
The large park was almost certainly Dennenoord, belonging to the former governor-general, Jonkheer Bonifacius de Jonge. De Jonge noted that morning that it had been quite peaceful until about 10.00 when a sudden bombardment hit the house and gardens, and smashed their conservatory. ‘We took our mattresses down to the servants’ hall.’ With the wounded lying everywhere, they now had almost sixty people in the house, and only a few candles for light. Goats and cows had been killed in the meadows outside, but he observed that you were risking your life trying to butcher them for meat.
The German attack on the western flank of the perimeter had begun with Kampfgruppe Lippert attacking on either side of the Utrechtseweg, supported by the 171st Artillery Regiment. To its south, Kampfgruppe Eberwein advanced, supported on its right by the Worrowski battalion, which had lost so many men when taking the heights of Westerbouwing the day before. But it was the sailors of the Schiffs-Stamm-Abteilung, armed with French rifles from 1940, who suffered the most. They were ‘heavily battered’. Armament improved only when captured British weapons began to be distributed, with ammunition obtained from parachute containers.
Standartenführer Harzer, who was now in command of the Division von Tettau as well, noted that the scratch units lacked field kitchens, and Luftwaffe units would abandon the tanks they were supposed to be protecting. Harzer moved in some SS NCOs to improve battle discipline. ‘It was the task of Division Hohenstaufen to imbue the motley units of all branches of the service with their fighting spirit.’ A no doubt exasperated General von Tettau sent round an order pointing out that ‘in the fighting over the last few days, no fewer than six tanks have been lost through locally unsuitable deployment by junior commanders, and infantry failing to accompany them. We cannot afford such losses any more.’ Panzer Company 224 was now reduced to three tanks and its commander had clear instructions to pull them out the moment infantry support disappeared.
Harzer was heartened by the arrival at midday of the first Royal Tiger tanks of the 503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion, but he soon recognized that these seventy-two-ton monsters could be deployed only one at a time, otherwise the brick streets of Oosterbeek would break up under their weight. ‘Whenever a “Königstiger” makes a turn,’ Harzer wrote, ‘the pavement is hurled aside.’
Model’s headquarters suddenly had an unsettling thought. They felt they could not rule out more landings. ‘The enemy can still deploy another three or four airborne divisions,’ the situation report stated that day.
Lieutenant Johnson, the other American officer at Oosterbeek, noticed that the Germans were now avoiding infantry attacks. ‘Instead they would run up a tank or self-propelled gun and knock us out of the houses, then move the tank back before we could bring up an anti-tank gun or PIATs to combat it. They also had some flame-throwers which they used to good advantage. At any time they wished they could bring down heavy mortar and arty fire on our little strong points making them quite uncomfortable. It was a slow process for them but they seemed to know that they had plenty of time . . . The men made many successful counter-attacks to regain these lost positions but the Germans would just repeat the process of using armor, artillery and automatic weapons and eventually we didn’t have enough men left to do any counter-attacking.’
Lieutenant Stevenson of the reconnaissance squadron also noticed the change in tactics. ‘We saw very little sign of German infantry at all on Friday. Jerry settled himself down to swamp the area with mortar fire and knocked down the houses systematically with [self-propelled] guns. These guns hit every house in our area at least once at very short range. We always heard the creaking of their tracks as they came along and it wasn’t pleasant.’ They decided to ambush the next assault gun, so an NCO and a trooper went into a slit trench at the crossroads. ‘About half an hour had gone by when one came creaking up again. The trooper let fly and hit with his first shot at about seventy yards. Unfortunately the shot immobilised the vehicle but not its guns. The crew must have recovered very quickly and they brought machine-gun fire to bear on the slit trenches killing and wounding two glider pilots who were in the next trench to our chaps. Luckily the trooper and the NCO were able to get out quick.’
The wounded were evacuated, but it was far too dangerous to collect the dead. Some of the corpses had been there for days and had begun to swell, stretching their battledress as if it had been pumped up. It was a very unpleasant sight and young, inexperienced soldiers could be badly affected. Outside the perimeter, the two Dutch boys who went foraging for their paratrooper friends decided to bury one of the crew members of a crashed transport aircraft. As they were digging, they were stopped by two Wehrmacht soldiers who demanded to know what they were doing. When they explained, one of them asked angrily: ‘Why are you burying a murderer? They have bombed our cities and killed our women and children. They don’t deserve to be buried, but to lie in a field and rot.’
With water available now only from lavatory cisterns and radiators in the houses, men in slit trenches were reduced to drinking from the puddles left by that morning’s downpour. Benzedrine euphoria still prompted some soldiers to believe that the whole of the Second Army was about to arrive to save them. A paratrooper, hearing tank tracks, shouted to his companion, ‘I knew they wouldn’t let us down!’ And round the corner came a Royal Tiger.
By the sixth day, the stress was beginning to tell when Harzer’s SS Pioneers launched an attack using flamethrowers, supported by 20mm flak guns. Paratroopers began to run back towards the Hartenstein headquarters in a sudden panic. Two glider pilot sergeants in their slit trench were astonished to see a Jeep come round the corner of the hotel, with General Urquhart standing in it bolt upright. His face was red and angry as he began roaring at the panic-stricken paratroopers: ‘Get back there, you bastards! You’re no bloody good to me!’ Some of the soldiers began to move back, shame-faced. Sergeant Hatch remarked disapprovingly to his companion in the trench: ‘A bloody general doing the job of a sergeant!’ Combat fatigue even drove some to suicide, usually a muzzle in the mouth or under the chin.
With so many attacks on the perimeter that day, the gunners of 64 Medium Regiment had to provide no fewer than thirty-one different fire missions. A battery of 5.5-inch guns was also brought up to increase the support. Once again the accuracy of their fire left observers filled with admiration. As an officer in the Somerset Light Infantry in the Betuwe wrote, ‘I doubt if any experienced infantry officer would deny that the Royal Artillery, during the Second World War, were the most professionally competent people in the British Army.’ He was right, but he should also have mentioned the Royal Engineers.
House cellars in Oosterbeek within the diminishing perimeter were by now desperately overcrowded. The noise of explosions and firing, the inability to move and the unhygienic conditions due to the lack of water led to high levels of stress, made worse by fear. A Catholic, sheltering under the bombardment with a small group of friends, described their ‘voices raised in a heart-wrenching and rhythmic “Hail Mary” to the accompanying shelling. Louder and louder this prayer sounded like a cry for help as outside the walls tremble. It is unbearable!’
For those in the cellars, the news that they were now in the front line was brought by apologetic British soldiers, announcing that their house was now a fire position. And yet the Dutch were still amused by what they saw as the almost excessive politeness of the British soldier. ‘Thank goodness there are also funny moments,’ an anonymous woman diarist wrote. ‘Yesterday evening, just when we were all going down into the cellar to sleep, and the children were already asleep, a Tommy comes very quietly down the stairs and says: “Would you mind keeping as quiet as possible and not to use any lights?” A Boche would simply have said “Shut your mouth!”’
Because of the 1st Airborne’s hopeless radio communications it was only on this, the sixth day of Operation Market Garden, that the First Allied Airborne Army had any idea of its losses. Colonel Warrack reported that the division had suffered more than 2,000 casualties, while ‘the strength of the medical personnel was reduced to 18 officers and 120 other ranks.’ This was down from a total strength of 31 officers and 371 other ranks. Some medics had been taken as prisoners by the Germans from the St Elisabeth Hospital, but the loss of stretcher-bearers had been disastrous. Many German soldiers and even SS respected the Red Cross symbol, but others targeted medical personnel because they knew the effect it had on morale. A corporal with the 16th (Parachute) Field Ambulance refused to wear an armband. ‘I learned in North Africa, the only purpose Red Cross markings served was to make you a better target.’
All the improvised hospitals within the perimeter were under fire. A young volunteer who entered the aid centre in the Hotel Tafelberg was amazed that the building had not yet burned down. ‘It is a complete hell for the patients,’ he wrote. ‘Try and imagine how ghastly it must be to lie in a bed with a leg amputated and to find that the wall next to you has been hit and with it your neighbour for the second time – only this time he doesn’t make it. This is what happens here. The curtains have been closed to catch the flying glass. A small flickering candle the only light in the hall. Some patients groan at every sound, some bite their lips in silence. In the operating theatre English and Dutch doctors work together by candlelight. I don’t think they get much sleep. I walk through a hall where at least a hundred English are still lying on stretchers and mattresses on the floor. I suppose they must be the lightly wounded. At least I hope so.’
Conditions in the old rectory, Kate ter Horst’s house next to Oosterbeek church, were just as pitiful. The walls were pockmarked all over by rifle fire and they had fifty-seven fatal casualties piled in their garden, giving off the sickly-sweet smell of decaying corpses. This ‘tall slim Dutchwoman with the blonde hair and the calm ice-blue eyes’ became known as the ‘Angel of Arnhem’. She helped care for the 250 men brought to the regimental aid post set up in her house, even though she had five children to look after. She comforted the wounded and dying by reading aloud from a Bible in the King James version. Her voice and the fine, familiar prose calmed the fears of all who listened to her.
Kate ter Horst was also a keen observer of the young men in their care. She described Rod, a sandy-haired Scot ‘who looks like a man of forty . . . It always strikes me how these young men, most of them not older than 20 or 25 in their voice and gesture, have a control and a sense of responsibility, a self-discipline, which makes them look more like family fathers than young men just coming from college or university.’ In five years of war, Rod found the fighting in Oosterbeek the worst he had experienced. ‘This is no fight,’ he told her. ‘This is murder.’
While parts of the perimeter had to be withdrawn, the Hotel Schoonoord had been recaptured. The hospital area, which by now included nine buildings, was under intense mortar fire. ‘A number of wounded were killed or re-wounded in their beds,’ Colonel Warrack reported. ‘It was one of the most tragic experiences to see these men who had been wounded in the battle coming to the medical services for help and protection and finding themselves still in the front line and even more exposed than in slit trenches. There was never a murmur even when mortar bombs burst in the wards.’ The fighting around the hospital continued, but this time a British soldier, who began firing from a shellhole in the garden, compromised the hospital’s neutrality.
The wounded were always thirsty, and as it had rained hard in the early hours, the staff and volunteers had rigged every waterproof cape and pipe available to catch the water off the roof and gutters in buckets and every receptacle available. ‘Water! We want it now so badly,’ wrote Hendrika van der Vlist. ‘The lavatories have become dunghills.’ She was still interested in the striking differences between their German patients. An officer, although a prisoner, loudly demanded a tetanus injection, which he insisted was standard practice in German hospitals. He also demanded to be exchanged for a British officer in German captivity. She asked an ordinary soldier, with whom she chatted easily, if he had voted for Hitler. He replied that he had been a schoolboy then. ‘Well, how old are you?’ she asked, having thought he was in his thirties. ‘Twenty-three,’ he replied. Seeing her surprise, he added: ‘The war has made me old.’ In an attempt to lighten the atmosphere, Hendrika said, ‘Fortunately the war is nearly over, so you can become young again.’ He replied, ‘When the spirit is old, you can’t become young again.’
She was struck by the pessimism of the young Germans in comparison to the optimism of most of the British soldiers, even when badly wounded. But then she reflected, ‘What kind of future lies ahead of them? If they do come out of this war alive, only misery awaits them.’ She remembered that the mother of one of her pupils had remarked that soon you would want to be ‘anything rather than German’. Only a Ukrainian in the SS, another patient, was likely to be worse off after the war. He was no volunteer, but that would not save him if he was returned to the Soviet Union.
There were also Polish wounded from their anti-tank squadron. They were put together to help each other and keep up their spirits. The German patients were clearly frightened of the Poles, but not of the British. Yet a shared fate often seemed to bring the wounded of both sides together. When a new stretcher case was brought in, Hendrika bent over to ask in English where he was wounded. ‘Verstehe nicht,’ he replied. ‘Don’t understand.’ With the blanket over him, she had not spotted the German uniform. The British paratrooper next to him raised his head in interest and asked if he were German. She nodded. He offered the German his own plate of food. Later, the German stopped a helper from giving another newly arrived soldier a glass of water. ‘The comrade should not drink, sister, he has a stomach wound.’
The number of dead was mounting at the Schoonoord too. The Royal Army Medical Corps sergeant major directed the stretcher-bearers to stack the bodies out in the garden now that there was no more room left in the hotel garage. Nights were the most difficult time, with no electricity. The staff had to step over bodies and limbs with only a match for light. A company sergeant major from the 11th Parachute Battalion observed that the wounded around him longed for anything which reminded them of home and family life. ‘A woman came in and brought a young, week-old baby with her. All the men asked to see the baby.’
The Schoonoord was soon retaken by the Germans. They brought in armed sentries pretending to guard it, but as the building lay on the front line it provided them with a way of forcing back other British positions, since they could not shoot in the direction of the hospital.
That night, Sosabowski ordered Lieutenant Albert Smaczny’s company to cross the river, but its men had no boats of their own. The 9th Field Company Royal Engineers, who had tried to improvise rafts out of Jeep trailers the night before, admitted failure. The sappers in the perimeter would instead have to ferry the Poles in six tiny reconnaissance boats and an RAF dinghy. They had hoped to create a ferry, hauled back and forth across the river, which could bring two Poles over at a time, but the current was strong and the signal cable kept breaking, so the sappers were reduced to paddling back and forth with only one Pole.
The dark brought further chaos. ‘Without any means to cross the river,’ Smaczny wrote, ‘we were forced to wait a long time before two rubber dinghies arrived, navigated by engineers. Some of the boats could seat no more than two people. After a while, two more rubber boats arrived, manned by British engineers. We began crossing by twos, sometimes one by one. Every now and then the enemy flashed a rocket over the crossing and volleys from German Spandaus searched for targets on the river. I made it to the other side.’
Glider pilots were supposed to lead them to the church in Oosterbeek, but the one taking Smaczny’s group lost his bearings, and they stumbled into a German anti-tank gun crew eating their meal. ‘Suddenly, I heard a terrified voice from a few steps away, “Herr Feldwebel, sie sind Tommies!” I realized that we had walked into a concentration of German troops.’ A messy little battle followed, with the Poles extricating themselves with a synchronized hurling of grenades. But as they approached the British lines they came under fire again, and Smaczny yelled at them not to shoot. Altogether only fifty-two Polish paratroopers were ferried across the river that night.
Other mishaps included two Sherman tanks from the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards, which were escorting a battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry to Driel. They ran on to Polish mines laid across the road and then fired at the Household Cavalry armoured cars. This advance force from the 130th Infantry Brigade had managed to skirt round the German positions near Valburg. And to make matters worse, the two DUKW amphibious trucks bringing desperately needed medical supplies for the 1st Airborne became stuck in the deep mud of the riverbank.
In the course of the day, Generalfeldmarschall Model reorganized the command structure in the Netherlands, with the Fifteenth Army taking responsibility from the North Sea to Rhenen, and Student’s First Fallschirm Army the eastern part from Rhenen to Roermond.
Meanwhile in Versailles, General Eisenhower had called a major conference at his headquarters in the Trianon Palace Hotel to discuss strategy. ‘Everyone there but Monty,’ Admiral Ramsay noted in his diary. Montgomery had sent a signal the previous morning: ‘For operational reasons consider I cannot leave this front to attend your conference Versailles tomorrow. Will send my chief of staff who has my full views on all matters.’ Montgomery claimed to be too busy directing the battle for Arnhem, but since there was little he could usefully do, many took his absence to be a deliberate snub to Eisenhower.
Montgomery’s decision to send his chief of staff Major General de Guingand was seen by American officers as a devious tactic. ‘A chief of staff is not authorized to make commitments for him,’ noted Bradley’s aide. ‘Monty can repudiate them at will.’ Apparently prior to the conference there had been a good deal of betting at SHAEF that the field marshal would not appear. And General Omar Bradley himself later said, ‘We checked up afterward and found Monty hadn’t done a damn thing that day except sit around his [command post]. There was no reason in the world why he couldn’t have come down to attend that conference except his own vanity and feeling of importance. He was too good to go to Ike’s headquarters.’
There was perhaps another reason. Despite Montgomery’s message to Eisenhower that he thought there was still ‘a sporting chance’ of taking the bridge at Arnhem, he must have sensed by then that a terrible disaster was taking place, which would considerably damage his reputation. After all his demands for priority in the north to get across the Rhine, he cannot have wanted to face Bradley, Patton and Eisenhower across the table in Versailles. And he cannot have been keen to encounter General Bedell Smith, or Strong, whose fears about German strength in the southern Netherlands he had ridiculed. The very next day Montgomery wrote in his diary ‘I am very doubtful myself now if they [1st Airborne] will be able to hold out, and we may have to withdraw them.’ And the fact that he never once visited Horrocks during the entire battle confirms the impression that he was keeping his distance, a rare event for ‘Master’.
The other architect of the fatal plan, Lieutenant General Boy Browning, was far more loath to admit the reality of the situation. General Brereton, the commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, wrote in his diary on 23 September: ‘An encouraging message came from General Browning in reply to an offer by General Hakewill-Smith, commander of 52nd Lowland Division [the airlanding formation in the First Allied Airborne Army], to send a complete force in gliders to aid the Red Devils. General Browning’s message follows: “Thanks for your message but offer not, repeat not, required as situation better than you think. We want lifts as already planned including Poles. Second Army definitely require your party and intend fly you in to Deelen airfield as soon as situation allows.”’ It is hard to imagine how Browning can have convinced himself that things were ‘better than you think’.
Browning had moved his headquarters into Nijmegen, with his caravan in a garden on Sophiaweg. His aide Eddie Newbury noted how the atmosphere became increasingly strained, with Browning unable to stop twisting the end of his moustache. The general, who could not stand inactivity, had no useful command function except over the British 1st Airborne, with which he was not even in contact. He had no reason to interfere with Gavin’s impressive handling of his sector, so the only formation effectively under him was the Princess Irene Brigade of the Royal Netherlands Army defending the bridge at Grave.
Operation Market Garden had been devastating for the 1st Airborne Division, but it was about to produce a far greater humanitarian disaster. At General Eisenhower’s request, the Dutch government-in-exile had called for an all-out railway strike to assist the airborne invasion. The Germans were outraged and intended to exact revenge. At 18.45 on Friday evening, 22 September, Generalleutnant von Wühlisch, the chief of staff of the Wehrmacht commander-in-chief, rang Model’s headquarters and spoke to Generalleutnant Krebs about German retaliatory measures for Dutch support to the Allies. ‘The destruction of Rotterdam with the blowing up of the electricity works etc. would cause disturbances among the civil population,’ he said. ‘An outbreak of panic is possible.’ Krebs suggested that they could postpone demolitions, which included water supplies as well as the electricity stations, for twenty-four hours.
Wühlisch then went on to say that ‘as a counter-measure against the Dutch railway workers’ strike, it is intended to seal off Amsterdam and The Hague from supplies etc. to enforce the restoration of rail traffic.’ This marked the first step in German revenge for Dutch ‘treason’. It would lead to the deliberate famine of the Hunger Winter.