The fate of the 1st Airborne Division at Oosterbeek was also affected by the German attacks on Hell’s Highway. They prevented Horrocks from bringing any more troops forward to reinforce the two divisions north of Nijmegen in the Betuwe. Only a single infantry brigade from the 43rd Wessex Division could be spared to join the Poles at Driel and cross the Neder Rijn to reinforce Urquhart’s exhausted force. XXX Corps was virtually immobilized as German artillery engaged convoys coming up its supply route.
Once again Veghel was the principal German objective, with the 107th Panzer-Brigade and Kampfgruppe Walther attacking from the east and Kampfgruppe Huber coming from the west. The latter force was supported by Oberstleutnant von der Heydte’s 6th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment advancing from Boxtel on Veghel. Heydte was scathing about the replacements and reserves scraped together to hold the line in the Netherlands. He knew that the bulk of his soldiers simply lacked the training to launch a proper attack. To make things worse, he had been ordered to send one of his battalions to sort out a crisis in the sector of the 245th Infanterie-Division. In exchange Heydte had received from the 2nd Fallschirmjäger-Regiment ‘a battalion of even lower fighting qualities, with poor officers, far from satisfactory in respect of discipline and addicted to arbitrary action, pilfering and outrages against the civilian population’.
Colonel Johnson had Kinnard’s 1st Battalion of the 501st holding the sand dunes at Eerde which lay across Heydte’s line of advance. Assault guns and a Jagdpanther tank destroyer pounded away at the windmill in the little village and at the church steeple. A German mortar round hit an ammunition truck in the street causing a number of casualties, both killed and wounded. Another shell, exploding outside the command post, wounded the British liaison officer and sliced off part of Colonel Johnson’s ear. Kinnard, standing there with them, suffered no more than a bad headache.
Johnson called for help from the 44th Royal Tank Regiment. Nine tanks arrived soon afterwards, but several of them were ‘brewed up’ by the Jagdpanther. American paratroopers tried to brave the flames to rescue crewmen, but in vain. They were reduced to charred corpses. American accounts claim that the other British tank commanders were so reluctant to advance after this disaster that they had to clear the dunes themselves. Kinnard’s plan was a pincer movement, but as an eyewitness noted, ‘what had begun as a tactical move became a soldier’s fight.’
Heydte complained that his whole attack had started half an hour late. ‘The battalion on the right had to attack across flat ground that offered practically no cover, while the battalion on the left attacked through thick brushwood. Towards midday, the right battalion was halted in a wooded fringe south-east of Schijndel, and the left battalion lost its way and strayed into the right battalion’s sector.’ Heydte, however, had clearly had ‘little confidence in the outcome’ from the start, as Generalleutnant Poppe observed. Having seen the American paratroopers in action, Heydte knew that the majority of his inexperienced men did not stand a chance against their far-better-trained opponents in a straight fight.
Johnson was able to call on artillery support from St Oedenrode, but Kinnard’s paratroopers, charging from position to position, often in close-quarter combat, made it impossible for the forward observers to call down fire which would not hit their own men. The battalion mortars in weapon pits by Eerde were in direct sight and could be much more precise. By 13.00, Heydte decided to call off the attack because of his casualties. The paratroopers of the 501st, showing an astonishing stamina on their short rations, had outfought their attackers magnificently, as Heydte himself acknowledged.
An American platoon commander recounted, ‘I saw them, in twos and threes, jump into machine-gun nests. I saw some of our men go individually at foxholes containing two or three Germans. What we did in those moments we could hardly remember afterwards, because we had not time to think. It was courage such as I’d never imagined possible – almost foolish courage – and I doubt if any group of men could have held their ground against it.’
East of Veghel, Kampfgruppe Walther and the 107th Panzer-Brigade were badly mauled by air strikes from the RAF’s Second Tactical Air Force and counter-attacks from the 32nd Guards Brigade sent back by Horrocks. At 20.50 Generalleutnant Krebs issued an order from Army Group B’s new position just south of Krefeld, that Panzer-Brigade 107 should renew its attack north-westwards. Student’s chief of staff replied that ‘Brigade 107 has suffered very high losses. The commanders of the panzer brigade, the panzer battalion and the panzergrenadier battalion have fallen.’ Major Berndt-Joachim Freiherr von Maltzahn’s evacuation due to his serious wounds was keenly felt by his men. The brigade was left with just three tanks and two assault guns still serviceable, an estimate later corrected to twelve tanks which were battleworthy. In any case the Kampfgruppe Walther and the remnants of the panzer brigade had to withdraw rapidly, because the British VIII Corps advancing through Helmond threatened their rear.
The German attacks on Hell’s Highway made the removal of casualties to the 24th Evacuation Hospital in Leopoldsburg impossible for the next four days. The 101st Airborne suffered 163 cases of combat exhaustion during its time in the Netherlands, and 30 per cent of them returned to duty after treatment within the divisional area. Far more serious was the shortage of plasma for battle wounds. The 82nd Airborne medics in the Baby Factory were also running short of essential supplies. ‘No more traffic from the south’, Martijn Louis Deinum wrote in his diary. Temporarily cut off from the rest of the Allied army, Nijmegen took stock of the situation. As a result of the fighting and the deliberate fire-raising, more than 16,000 were homeless.
Another reason for the rapid withdrawal of the 107th Panzer-Brigade that day was the sight overhead of C-47 Dakotas, towing Waco gliders, heading for the drop zone just over the Maas–Waal Canal. General Gavin’s 325th Glider Infantry Regiment and the 80th Airborne Anti-Aircraft Battalion were arriving, five days late. He sent the Glider Infantry, supported by Sherman tanks of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, to widen the bridgehead round Mook for VIII Corps to occupy. East of Nijmegen the 2nd Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, also supported by a squadron of the Sherwood Rangers, managed to push back the northern wing of General Meindl’s II Fallschirmjäger Corps as far as Erlekom. ‘A short but bitter battle ensued,’ the battalion reported. ‘Three enemy tanks and one half-track were knocked out and the enemy was completely routed leaving many dead. We had two British tanks supporting us which accounted for the enemy tanks.’
Meindl complained that he was still short of ammunition, but he at least received the 190th Infanterie-Division under the Austrian Generalleutnant Ernst Hammer. It was given the whole of the Reichswald sector between Kranenburg and Gennep. And while the 325th Glider Infantry became responsible for the southern part, Tucker’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment took over the northern sector from the Waal down to Groesbeek. The Den Heuvel woods lay to its front, as well as some of the original landing zones. ‘Skeletons of gliders lay silhouetted like ghosts all along no-man’s land,’ wrote Captain Adam A. Komosa. ‘They were stripped of their canvas fabric by the Germans who in all probability used it for shelter.’
Gavin’s headquarters was still demanding prisoners for interrogation, so F Company was ordered to mount a night attack into the woods, following an artillery barrage. It was hardly a silent operation to snatch a lone sentry. ‘Angry exchanges of machine-gun and small arms fire now took place. Much shouting, some screaming, and a hell of a lot of swearing was heard.’ They returned with a prisoner, still arguing. ‘Let me throw my bayonet through that son of a bitch.’ ‘Look you stupid ass!’ Sergeant Bishop shot back. ‘If we don’t bring this dried up little bastard back to the CP alive, we’ll have to come out here tomorrow night and do this all over again.’
Not long afterwards, another patrol was sent out to seize a prisoner. While they were away, a German patrol came through 3rd Battalion’s lines and killed the brother of one of the men out on patrol. When they returned with their prisoner, they wanted to shoot him as soon as they found out what had happened. Their platoon commander stopped them from killing the German and took him to the battalion command post after he had been roughed up. ‘The prisoner would not talk,’ Major Cook recorded. ‘I interviewed him and knowing that he understood English, told him I would give him two minutes to start talking or else I would kill him as he was of no further use to me. When the two minutes were up, I dramatically pulled out my .45 and the S-3 Captain Keep, and the S-2 Captain Carmichael, who were on either side of the prisoner, stepped away. For once I saw real fear in a man’s eyes and he started answering questions.’
The Sherwood Rangers, one of the most effective British armoured regiments, had taken over from the Coldstream. They worked closely with the 82nd Airborne on its Reichswald flank. The American paratroopers had no idea what Yeomanry meant, but they recognized the word ‘Rangers’ and assumed that they were an armoured equivalent of the elite American force. The cavalrymen certainly admired the fighting qualities of the 82nd. In a battle near Beek, Lieutenant Stuart Hills saw one paratrooper ‘continuing to fire his weapon with a leg and an arm blown off’. The commanding officer of the Sherwood Rangers, Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Christopherson, liked General Jim Gavin and considered his paratroopers to be the best infantry they had worked with – ‘tough, brave and cheerful’. But ‘maybe on some occasions’, Christopherson wrote in his diary, ‘they were too tough, especially in the treatment of their prisoners, whom they seldom took. I shall never forget seeing a Jeep full of American paratroopers driving along with the head of a German pierced with an iron stake and tied to the front. This spectacle haunts me still.’
British paratroopers at Oosterbeek could be tough too. On 23 September, a wounded officer from the 1st Para Battalion was lying in an aid station near the Tafelberg. ‘Next to me was one of our chaps with his fingers blown off coolly smoking a fag held between the bloody stumps of his fingers. Somehow summed up the airborne soldier I thought.’ Tobacco was not the main preoccupation by then. ‘Food becoming very short,’ a pathfinder wrote that day. ‘Only got a couple of biscuits and a dab of jam all today. Had to break into my emergency ration.’
Despite heavy rain at dawn, the battle continued relentlessly. ‘07.00 terrific mortar barrage,’ Lieutenant Stevenson of the reconnaissance squadron noted. ‘S[elf] P[ropelled] guns came up again and began systematically destroying every house which might give shelter. All this time, in the cellars of almost every house, were Dutch civilians, women and children, who had been caught up in the battle. By now we were losing count of time. More SP guns and more shellfire.’ Brigadier Hicks, who was not a man to exaggerate, described the shelling at Oosterbeek as ‘the worst and the most hellish that I had ever experienced, including the shelling of World War I in the trenches’.
Inevitably cases of psychological breakdown increased, even among the bravest. A glider pilot recorded how one man locked himself in a shed near Oosterbeek church and began firing his Sten gun all around the walls, shouting ‘Come on you bastards!’ He killed himself in the end. Physical exhaustion, a captain wrote later, almost reached ‘a point that being killed would be worth it’.
‘My lads mostly OK,’ Major Blackwood wrote in his diary, ‘though two cases of shell-shock: one a stout warrior who had wakened in his trench to find his pal’s severed head in his lap.’ In Oosterbeek church they ate some compo which had been reinforced with two Angora rabbits brought in by a sergeant. ‘We did raise a grin by looking at our filthy beards in a small mirror. The gunners were using the church as an O[bservation] P[ost] and the astute Hun brought his 88s to bear on us. One of the shells upset the rabbit stew. Had to abandon the church. Roof came down. In foxholes outside near British 75[mm] gun positions. The whole area around our trenches was pitted with holes, and between us and the river lay the inevitable dead cows and a neatly disembowelled horse.’
The pitiless determination of the Waffen-SS was once again evident. A Dutch engineer called de Soet saw a dozen German soldiers, with their hands in the air, guarded by four British paratroopers. There was an explosion and it appeared that a German had thrown a grenade among them for having surrendered.
Major Powell of the 156th reflected on the fact that he had caught fleas because their battalion headquarters was in a chicken house. He expected the perimeter to be overrun at any moment, but the Germans were relying on their tanks and self-propelled assault guns to smash the houses around their heads. There was less support from the 64th Medium Regiment that day. They could manage only twenty-five fire missions. Ammunition reserves had become a concern now that the Germans had cut the XXX Corps supply route, and their own division was also calling for support. Some soldiers tried to keep up their spirits in the old way by singing ‘Lili Marlene’ or playing records. An Austrian soldier claimed that when their record came to an end, the British would yell ‘Play another one, Fritz!’, and the Germans would shout ‘Play another one, Tommy!’ when one of theirs finished.
On the western side at Dennenoord, Jonkheer Bonifacius de Jonge wrote, ‘Every day is worse than the day before.’ The house had been hit with three shells that Saturday. Only the central staircase was intact. The gasworks just to their south had been hit and were blazing. The house was stifling with everybody packed into the basement, where soldiers were sitting on the floor back to back. Their expressions were dead after so many days without food or sleep. The former governor-general’s wife offered a soldier some cognac to pep him up. ‘But I’m not wounded,’ he said. ‘You should not give me that.’
Bonifacius de Jonge tried to distract their little granddaughter Neelsje from the firing by taking candles out of packets and putting them back in again. ‘But when all the wounded are lying down, you can see Neelsje skipping between the blood-soaked mattresses, and hopping over the blood-drenched bandages and torn battledress, and with a soft smile, those poor wretches reach out to her. Occasionally this is heart-wrenching.’
The Hotel Schoonoord found itself under German control again that day. An Unteroffizier, who looked very pleased with himself, brought a considerable number of men to guard the place. After making sure that the German wounded were still receiving good treatment, he announced, ‘I see the British are not the Russians.’ He announced that all German patients who could be moved would be evacuated. But he also insisted on posting guards at all the windows, which only encouraged the Polish paratroopers in the area to shoot at them. They could not look at a German with a weapon and not want to kill him. At one stage a German machine-gunner took up position at a top-floor window, which prompted outraged protests from the British doctors.
The hotel had suffered badly in the fighting. A number of the ceilings were starting to collapse, which was hardly comforting to the wounded underneath. A detachment of SS selected those British wounded who could still walk and marched them off to Arnhem. The padre of the Glider Pilot Regiment found himself in a conversation with one of the young panzergrenadiers. ‘It is the Jews we hate,’ the young SS soldier said. ‘The Jews and the Russians.’
‘Why do you hate the Jews?’
‘Because they started the war.’
‘Why do you hate the Russians?’
‘Why we hate the Russians?’ The young Nazi gave the padre a pitying smile. ‘Because . . . well, you would know if you saw them.’
Colonel Warrack had to send out an order to the regimental aid posts telling them not to evacuate any more wounded as nothing could be done for them in the dressing stations and hospitals. The wounded lying on the floor had to share a blanket. Soldiers still fighting passed the bulk of the food supplies retrieved from containers back to the wounded, yet undernourishment remained a major problem. Even more critical was the lack of medicines. ‘Supplies of morphia and bandages were getting low,’ Warrack noted in his report. ‘It was bad enough to run short of food and water,’ a Dutch volunteer wrote, ‘but the worst was to run short of morphia and see men staring at the ceiling, crying silently in pain.’ With no source of fresh water, apart from catching rain from the odd downpour, they could not clean patients or operate. ‘Surgery was impossible and rest, warmth and fluids were difficult.’ Although water was so precious, Lieutenant Colonel Marrable, the commanding officer of 181 (Airlanding) Field Ambulance, still insisted that all officers should shave, which they did in the same single mess tin of cold, murky water. Every shop in Oosterbeek and most empty houses had been stripped. So ‘a couple of sheep were acquired and despatched with the aid of a Sten gun by Captain Griffin, the air landing dentist, and turned into stew.’
The greatest lack at the dressing station in the ter Horst house was anti-gangrene serum. ‘At first many of the wounds were not serious,’ a medical orderly said, ‘but they began developing gangrene. It only takes a few hours . . . We were taking out four or five dead every day.’ NCOs in the Royal Army Medical Corps could display an astonishing courage and determination, as one wounded paratrooper testified. A German tank began to shell the ter Horst house. An RAMC corporal seized a Red Cross flag, and went right up to the tank. When the commander appeared out of the turret, he asked angrily why they were shelling a house clearly marked with a Red Cross. The tank commander apologized, turned his tank around and trundled back towards Arnhem.
At 13.05, Model’s Army Group B headquarters heard that Hitler was outraged to find that the 1st Airborne had not yet been eliminated. He had just ordered that ‘the 15 Tiger tanks were to be deployed by II SS Panzer Corps’. Soon afterwards, another message came through to say that Heavy Panzer Battalion 506 with Royal Tigers and Panzerjäger Battalion 741 were on their way to strengthen Bittrich’s SS Panzer Corps and Meindl’s II Fallschirmjäger Corps.
Bittrich’s troops in the Betuwe had been forced back from the line at Ressen to Elst by the 129th Brigade. Well aware of the build-up of British forces to reinforce the Poles at Driel, Bittrich wanted to attack west towards Valburg to cut their route, but the Kampfgruppe Knaust’s panzer company had lost three tanks from the attack by the Somerset Light Infantry and the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards on Oosterhout. And he could not use his Tiger tanks because the cross-country routes would collapse under their weight. Bittrich also ordered the 30th Machine-Gun Battalion to take positions down by the Neder Rijn to cover the crossing places.
General der Flieger Christiansen, the Wehrmacht commander-in-chief Netherlands, issued a bombastic order of the day congratulating the Division von Tettau ‘under the unerring and energetic leadership of General von Tettau’. Oberst Fullriede of the Hermann Göring Division must have felt sick on reading it. Christiansen was claiming that the enemy was being pushed back towards the east, and yet Tettau was complaining that they could not advance because of the fire from 64th Medium Regiment, which he believed was Polish heavy artillery.
A company from the reconnaissance battalion of the Frundsberg, under Obersturmführer Karl Ziebrecht, was ordered to push along the north bank of the Neder Rijn to watch the other shore at Driel. The rest of the reconnaissance battalion was on the other side of the river with the Swoboda flak brigade, along the railway line between Elden and Elst facing the Poles. During the day, the rest of the 130th Brigade pushed on via Valburg to Driel, partly concealed by the driving rain. At the same time the 214th Brigade attacked Elst with the 7th Somerset Light Infantry, the 1st Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment and a squadron of the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards.
Rottenführer Alfred Ringsdorf of the 21st Panzergrenadier Regiment was sitting in a house in Elst playing the piano. He did not hear the Shermans approaching until a shell went right through the room, fortunately missing the piano. But Major Knaust’s powerful reserve of Tiger tanks began firing, and the Shermans pulled back, having destroyed one Mark V Panther.
‘We had four Tiger tanks and three Panther tanks,’ Horst Weber recounted. ‘We were convinced that we would gain another victory here, that we would smash the enemy forces. But then Typhoons dropped these rockets on our tanks and shot all seven to bits. And we cried. We cried from sheer rage, that there could be such injustice, that the soldiers on one side should have everything and the soldiers on the other side should have nothing. We would see two black dots in the sky and that always meant rockets. Then the rockets would hit the tanks which would burn. The soldiers would come out all burnt and screaming with pain.’
Weber admitted that when Typhoon fighter-bombers knocked out these tanks, he and his fellow panzergrenadiers had been ‘running for our lives as fast as we could’, but then Knaust had appeared in his half-track brandishing one of his crutches, yelling ‘Go back! Go back!’ And because it was Major Knaust, they felt ashamed and did as they were told. The young panzergrenadiers clearly worshipped him, even though he was not a member of the Waffen-SS. ‘He saved our front line down at Elst. I would have done anything for him.’
Knaust re-formed the line. He gave the Frundsberg panzergrenadiers two Tiger tanks next to their position. ‘It was like a partnership. We gave each other mutual protection. We saw to it that no infantry could attack the tanks from the side and the Tigers protected us from the Shermans. But most important the Tigers helped us to fight our fear.’
Colonel Mackenzie arrived at Browning’s headquarters after various adventures he could have done without. According to the Household Cavalry war diary, he ‘had quite an exciting experience when the Daimler armoured car in which he was travelling became involved in a fire fight with an enemy half-track and he as loader fired off eight rounds’. The armoured car had then overturned. Mackenzie had very nearly been captured when German infantry advanced in extended line, ‘like they were out on a partridge shoot’, searching for the crew, and shouting ‘Come out, Tommy!’
Browning’s aide Eddie Newbury noted that they had been shaken by Mackenzie’s appearance. He had ‘quite a stubble of beard and his clothes were dirty and dishevelled and he looked very tired’. Browning said later that Mackenzie and Myers were ‘putty coloured like men who had come through a Somme winter’.
Whatever illusions Browning still had should have been shattered by Mackenzie’s report on conditions within the perimeter. Mackenzie did not spare his feelings, yet he felt afterwards that Browning had still not grasped the gravity of their predicament. Providing their armoured taxi service once more, the Household Cavalry ran Mackenzie and Myers back to Driel so that they could cross over the Neder Rijn that night, with more Polish paratroopers, to report to General Urquhart.
The chief concern for General Horrocks was not the battle for Elst. It was of course the fate of the 1st Airborne at Oosterbeek. He sent his chief of staff Brigadier Pyman down to see General Dempsey, the commander of the Second Army, who had come up as far as St Oedenrode. It was decided that a last effort should be made to reinforce the airborne division’s bridgehead. If that failed, and there were reports that the Germans were preparing an all-out attempt to crush the perimeter, then the surviving paratroopers would be evacuated back across to the Betuwe side. Dempsey authorized Horrocks and Browning to take that decision without reference to higher authority. They could make up their minds the next day at a conference to be held at 43rd Division headquarters at Valburg.
Urquhart showed his two brigadiers, Hicks and Hackett, and Colonel Loder-Symonds the message he intended to send to Browning describing their situation. It ended: ‘Morale still adequate, but continued heavy mortaring and shelling is having obvious effects. We shall hold but at the same time hope for a brighter 24 hours ahead.’
The morning’s rain gave way to clearer skies. On their own initiative, Lieutenant Johnson of the American air support party and a Canadian officer Lieutenant Leo Heaps had crossed the Neder Rijn before dawn in a dinghy. They went to Sosabowski’s command post in Driel and briefed his staff on the situation in the perimeter. The two lieutenants had a hot meal and a proper drink for the first time in over a week.
With the clear skies, they could look back across the Neder Rijn to the north bank from where they had come to watch Allied aircraft in action. ‘We saw the first real air support of the operation. For more than half an hour Typhoons and Thunderbolts strafed and bombed the German anti-aircraft gun positions. Then the Stirlings and Dakotas came in with their resupply loads. From Driel I saw flares go up from our perimeter across the river to mark the DZ and almost immediately the Germans on three sides of the Division area also shot up flares. It was damn heartbreaking to see those so badly needed supplies drop up to 5,000 yards away from the Division. No more than ten percent were recovered by the Division. I would have given my right arm for a radio set that could have contacted those planes to guide them to the right area. Two Dakotas were set ablaze by the anti-aircraft fire but both kept right on going till they could drop their load. Just one man got out of the two planes before they hit.’ Altogether 123 British Stirlings and C-47 Dakotas transported the supplies that day. Six were lost and sixty-three damaged. German anti-aircraft fire was reducing the RAF transport fleet at such a rate that resupply could not continue much longer.
That afternoon, Major General Sosabowski received a signal message that assault boats were on their way. ‘I was not very pleased,’ he said. ‘I could not understand why they wanted to sacrifice specially trained airborne troops in an assault crossing when the 43rd Division had the boats and was trained in making assaults. But I had my orders.’
The sky had cleared entirely by dusk, leaving a starlit night. Colonel Myers on the southern bank was supervising the distribution of the 130th Brigade’s assault boats to the Polish brigade. He had every sympathy for the Poles. The boats were of a different type and size to what they had been told. They did not arrive until 02.00 and only ten proved capable of floating. Two others had been holed in transit by German fire. No engineers were provided with the boats, so the Poles, who had never been trained in river crossings, had great difficulty paddling them. Instead of a whole battalion crossing, only 153 Polish officers and men reached the north bank in the few hours of darkness left. Many others were killed or wounded by the German 30th Machine-Gun Battalion, firing over the water on fixed lines. The casualties were brought back to the southern bank. Sosabowski, who was watching from the dyke, halted the operation shortly before dawn. He had probably heard the American joke that ‘The British would fight to the very last ally.’ It might well have crossed his mind that night.