Armageddon (12 page)

As Colonel Frost approached the bridge, he ordered Private Bob Peatling to go and look for his lost B Company. Peatling returned after an hour wandering empty streets, to report that he could find no sign of the missing men. There was desultory firing across the bridge, from the south end still held by the Germans. Peatling was ordered to escort Frost’s second-in-command to inspect the pontoons, a little way downriver. As they approached, Germans began to fire tracer at them from the far bank. Peatling fired a few rounds back, then looked for his officer. “Major Wallis! Major Wallis!” he called in vain through the darkness of the town. Wallis was killed shortly afterwards, by a burst of “friendly fire” from a quick-fingered British Bren-gunner. The bewildered private soldier, now alone, walked the silent streets until he met some military police escorting twenty-two German prisoners. Peatling attached himself to the column. They arrived at the police station, where they put the Germans in the cells, and exchanged warm greetings with some Dutch policemen, who then left, saying cheerfully: “It’s all yours now.” The little group of British soldiers remained silent and watchful all night, listening to the firing in the town. At first light, to their dismay a column of German trucks drew up outside. Infantry descended and clattered along the street. Peatling said to the only British officer present: “I’m off back to the bridge.” The lieutenant told him to stay put. The German prisoners began to demand food. Two German soldiers strode heedless into the police station. The British shot them, then waited in deep apprehension. Amazingly, nothing happened. The Germans outside appeared not to have noticed the firing. Then a paratrooper on the first floor loosed a Sten-gun burst into the street. There was a brief exchange of fire, before silence fell again. The enemy in Arnhem seemed as bewildered and uncertain as the British.

It was Tuesday afternoon before a large body of Germans approached the police station purposefully. Somebody said to a British NCO, Sergeant Galloway: “Are you going to take that lot on?” No, said Galloway, “XXX Corps are going to be here in forty-eight hours.” He walked out of the door with his hands in the air, and was shot at once. Chaos followed. Peatling bolted to the attic at the top of the building. He heard uproar as bursts of fire disposed of his comrades. Then the Germans broke in to release the prisoners. At last, the shooting stopped, and the enemy moved on. No one searched the attic. The frightened soldier assuaged his thirst by slipping downstairs when he dared, to drink water from the toilet bowl. He settled down to wait for British tanks.

Y
ET THE RELIEF
column was a long, long way off. At Arnhem bridge, half-tracks of 10th SS Panzer were now deployed on the south bank. Their firepower enabled the Germans to halt every attempt by Frost’s men, holding the north end, to cross over. In a clash between armies, lightly protected half-tracks and armoured cars were regarded merely as tools for reconnaissance and transporting men. In Arnhem, however, every German fighting vehicle capable of withstanding small-arms fire was a menace to the paratroopers, equipped with only hand-held PIATs—British counterparts of the American bazooka—and two six-pounder anti-tank guns. From now on, the Germans were able to reinforce steadily, while the British haemorrhaged irreplaceable men, weapons and ammunition. The whole of 1st Airborne Division save Frost’s little band was engaged in a desperate, ill-coordinated series of battles to break through into Arnhem while retaining control of its landing zones north-westwards. In the days that followed, the British perimeter shrank under relentless pressure. Historians have devoted so much attention to the heroism of 1st Airborne’s struggle outside Arnhem that some have lost sight of the essential reality: within twelve hours of their landing, the British were no longer engaged in an operation with any chance of securing Arnhem bridge, but were battling for personal survival. Frost’s men did not hold the bridge at Arnhem, they merely possessed a toehold at one end of it, which enabled them to dispute passage with the Germans. Extraordinary success would have been required from the relieving ground force to undo the consequences of the paratroopers’ initial failure.

On Monday morning, 18 September, Lieutenant Jack Reynolds of the South Staffordshires had just assembled his platoon on the landing zone outside Arnhem, when he heard the booming voice of his brigadier, forty-seven-year-old “Pip” Hicks: “Reynolds—I want you to go forward. You’re my ‘eyes’.” The young officer thought his brigadier “a pompous old fool with a First World War mentality and no idea how to deploy troops.” But he obediently hitched a lift on a motorbike down the tramline towards Arnhem. They saw a tram on fire and heard distant gunfire, but at first met no enemy. Like hundreds of men that morning, Reynolds passed the German
Stadtkommandant
of Arnhem, Kussin, still hanging dead from his staff car at Wolfheze where British fire had caught him the previous day. He noticed that the cigarette the general had been smoking was burned down to his fingers. Reynolds returned to report that the road was open. The rifle companies began to advance, the mortar platoon following with its weapons on clumsy trolleys. Soon, they began to take incoming fire from the far side of the river. They could not get off the road, because every Dutch house and garden they passed was solidly fenced. The mortarmen found themselves among D Company, pinned down and suffering a steady drain of casualties. “From then on, it was a muddle,” said Reynolds. He sited his mortars and went forward with a signaller, though the unit’s 18 sets had not worked since they landed. He met a few stragglers, whom he took with him. Suddenly, he was disheartened to observe German tanks on the road below, on the British bank of the river, moving towards Arnhem bridge: “They weren’t just trying to get behind us—they were already there.” From that moment, British infantrymen were playing a deadly local game of hide-and-seek with German armoured vehicles. Reynolds never saw his mortars again. He asked his radio-operator whether he could make any contact. The signaller tried a bleak little joke: “Message from Brigade HQ—the men may shave. No sir, sorry sir, the set’s dead.” “Fuck it,” said his officer, “pick up a Sten gun.”

At the bridge engagement was not continuous. There were long intervals of inactivity, even boredom, for the paratroopers of Frost’s A Company, while the Germans prepared their next move. “In some ways, the silences were the worst,” said John Killick. “There was the apprehension, and then the sound of engines starting around the corners, followed by the grinding, squealing clatter of tracks, and the sudden terrible sight of a tank coming round the corner, traversing its turret towards you.” It is interesting to speculate whether the battle might have been transformed had the British possessed a hand-held anti-tank weapon as good as that of the Germans, whose Panzerfaust frustrated many Allied attacks in the last year of the war. As it was, the British soldiers holding the north end of Arnhem bridge found themselves being relentlessly bombarded towards destruction, without the means to do much about it. “Everything was on fire,” said John Killick. “It was a hellish scene.” British ammunition was running out fast. The paratroopers in and around Arnhem, some nine battalion groups strong, now faced fourteen equivalent German units, which also possessed an overwhelming superiority in armoured vehicles and support weapons. Hereafter, the balance of forces would continue to shift relentlessly in the Germans’ favour.

T
HE
B
RITISH LAND
dash for Arnhem was commanded by the much loved Brian Horrocks of XXX Corps. “A tall, lithe figure,” according to Chester Wilmot, “with white hair, angular features, penetrating eyes and eloquent hands, Horrocks moved among his troops more like a prophet than a general.” “At the time, we liked Horrocks’s affability and effervescence,” said Captain David Fraser of the Guards Armoured Division. “Later, I came to think that he was a superficial character.” Horrocks had brought with him from the North African desert a reputation as a driving leader. Yet from the outset almost everything that could go wrong with XXX Corps’s breakout from their bridgehead on the Meuse–Escaut canal did so.

The 17 September operation began with a bombardment at 1415, pounding the German defences on a front a mile wide and five miles deep. The Irish Guards, leading the British advance, enjoyed a few illusory moments of optimism. Their Sherman tanks, adorned with huge orange phosphorescent panels to identify them to circling RAF Typhoons, sped away up the road at 1435. Then the Germans opened fire with machine-guns and Panzerfausts from well-concealed positions in neighbouring trees and ditches. It became plain that XXX Corps’s bombardment had failed to suppress the defences. Half the leading squadron of Shermans was destroyed within minutes. British infantry advanced towards the woods to winkle out the opposition. Heavy air strikes were called in. The Germans had deployed elements of five battalions, mostly SS and paratroopers, with the dubious assistance of a penal unit. Many of the Germans holding the road had escaped from Belgium with Fifteenth Army, through the gap so disastrously left open by the British beyond Antwerp a fortnight earlier.

Horrocks had hoped that his tanks would be in Eindhoven within two hours. Instead, by nightfall they had advanced only seven miles. Among the German dead, to their alarm they identified men from 9th SS and 10th SS Panzer, General Student’s First Parachute Army and Fifteenth Army. The enemy units defending the road were under strength, sketchily organized and ill equipped, but they included some of the best German fighting soldiers in Holland. As darkness fell, the British halted. The commanding officer of the Irish Guards later quoted a remark of his divisional chief of staff, who said that evening: “Push on to Eindhoven tomorrow, old boy, but take your time. We’ve lost a bridge.” This remark—obviously influenced by reports of the crossing demolished at Son—reflected very poorly upon the leadership of Guards Armoured. The blown crossing at Son made it more urgent, not less, to reach the town and start repairs. Here was the first evidence that the divisional commander Allan Adair and his staff took far too relaxed a view of their task.

Captain Karl Godau, commanding a 105mm battery of 10th SS, was astounded when he saw the British stop that night. Godau never forgot the first Market Garden battles, because they fell on his thirty-first birthday. He had been a Waffen SS officer since 1938, with long service on the Eastern Front. He joined the panzers in Holland after a spell with a reserve regiment while he convalesced from wounds. On 17 September, his unit received the Alarm message at 1400, and soon afterwards was strafed by fighter-bombers as it moved forward, losing some trucks. Godau’s four guns were sited within yards of the Eindhoven road, as the first Shermans rolled towards them. He spoke to the headquarters of
Kampfgruppe Walther,
and urged that his battery should not open fire at close range. Once they did so, revealing their own positions, they would have no hope of withdrawing to fight again, even if they knocked out a few Shermans. Godau’s commander agreed, and ordered the battery to relocate a thousand yards further back, as the battle raged in front. There they waited for the British that evening. But the British did not come. “Their attack could have worked,” said Godau wonderingly. “We had so little. If they had kept going that night, there was nothing worth mentioning between their halting place and Eindhoven.” But moving tanks at night on a single-road front was a hazardous business, which the rulebook for armoured operations strongly discouraged. XXX Corps stopped.

Although British attention focused upon the enemy’s self-propelled guns and 88mms, Germans say that on the first day most of the damage was done to the British armoured column by infantry armed with fausts, firing at point-blank range from ditches beside the road. It should be stressed that the defenders did not find these encounters agreeable; indeed they found them shocking affairs, in which they suffered casualties of around 50 per cent, most from fighter-bombers and artillery fire. German communications were shattered. Small parties of men were fighting when they met British forces, then falling back as best they could. Kurt Student’s so-called First Fallschirmjäger Army, in reality amounting scarcely to a division, was split down the middle by the Allied advance, and despaired of its own position. But, in a battle in which speed was vital, Student’s men had already inflicted crippling delay on the British.

Next morning, 18 September, the Guards met little opposition until they reached the village of Aalst, and thereafter at a bridge over the Dommel, where four 88mm guns covered the road. The tankmen called for air strikes, and were furious to discover that these were unavailable. Despite bright sunshine over Holland, the RAF’s airfields in Belgium were fogged in. After two hours of fighting, however, British luck changed. A reconnaissance group found a track by which it outflanked the defenders, then charged them from the rear and cleared the road. An hour later, Guards tanks were crawling through hysterically cheering Dutch crowds in Eindhoven. Men of the American 101st said later that the people of Holland gave them their warmest welcome of the war. They loved it. One of Taylor’s men observed that he found the Dutch a great deal more sympathetic than the British.

At 1930 on Monday, Guards Armoured reached the bridge at Son. The Allies now controlled twenty-eight miles of the sixty-five-mile corridor to Arnhem. The tanks halted to wait for the bridge to be repaired.

J
ACK
R
EYNOLDS
and his unit, the South Staffs, were locked into the long, messy, bloody battle in the suburbs of Arnhem. There was no continuous front, no coherent plan, merely a series of uncoordinated collisions between rival forces in woods, fields, gardens and streets. “If anything moved, you fired.” A German tank shell landed beside Reynolds as he smoked a bulldog pipe. A blasted clod of earth drove the pipe down his throat, breaking half his front teeth. Dutch civilians craned from their homes in terrible innocence to watch the battle. The British kept imploring them to take cover. “Typically British—whenever we went into a house, we knocked on the door.” Reynolds possessed a low opinion of his own colonel, which was not improved when he heard the battalion padre demand anxiously, “Shouldn’t we protect the right flank?,” and the CO duly deployed a platoon as his spiritual adviser suggested. The young officer felt a mounting rage towards his commanders—“That was when it got home to me, what a very bad operation this was. The scales dropped from my eyes when I realized just how far from our objective, the bridge, we’d been landed. We knew what even a handful of Germans could do—they were so damned efficient.” During one endless night, as Reynolds crept from one position to another, he glimpsed a dark shape, groped forward and touched it. It was a German tank. He ran his hand down one of its tracks, then tiptoed away into the darkness: “I realized that we were completely overrun.” He and his little group were forced to surrender next morning.