By 10:30 A.M. Sunday, agreement on the partial truce was reached, although Wolters recollects “that the Germans seemed worried. Both the Tafelberg and the Schoonoord hotels were sitting on the front lines and the Germans could not guarantee to stop mortaring and shelling.” Harzer was mainly concerned about the long-range shelling of the British south of the Rhine and whether it could be controlled during the casualty evacuation. Skalka says that after assurances had been given on this point, he received a radio message from British Second Army headquarters. “It was simply addressed to the medical officer, 9th SS PanzerDivision, thanking me and asking if a cease-fire could extend long enough for the British to bring up medical supplies, drugs and bandages from across the Rhine.” Skalka radioed back, “We do not need your help but request only that your air force refrain from bombing our Red Cross trucks continually.” He was answered immediately: “Unfortunately, such attacks occur on both sides.” Skalka thought the message “ridiculous.” Angrily he replied, “Sorry, but I have not seen our air force in two years.” Back came the British message: “Just stick to the agreement.” Skalka was now enraged, so much so, he claims, that he radioed back, “Lick my -----”*
The arrangement, as finally worked out, called for a two-hour truce beginning at 3 P.M. The wounded would leave the perimeter by a designated route near the Tafelberg Hotel. Every effort was to be made “to slacken fire or stop completely.” Troops on both sides holding front-line positions were warned to hold their fire. As Skalka began to order “every available ambulance and jeep to assemble behind the front lines,” Warrack and Wolters, about to head back to their own lines, were allowed to fill their pockets with morphia and medical supplies. Wolters “was glad to get out of there, especially from the moment Schwarz said to me, ‘You don’t speak German like a Britisher.’ ”
En route back to the perimeter, a Red Cross flag flying from their jeep and escorted by another German medical officer, War-rack and Wolters were permitted to stop at St. Elisabeth’s Hospital to inspect conditions and visit the British wounded—among them Brigadier Lathbury, who, with badges of rank removed, was now “Lance Corporal” Lathbury. They were greeted by the chief British medical officer, Captain Lipmann Kessel; the head of the surgical team, Major Cedric Longland; and the senior Dutch surgeon, Dr. van Hengel—all of whom, Warrack remembers, “were desperately anxious for news.” Heavy fighting had taken place about the hospital. At one point there had even been a pitched battle in the building with Germans firing over the heads of patients in the wards, Kessel reported. But since Thursday the area had been quiet and Warrack discovered that, in contrast to the harrowing ordeal of the wounded in the perimeter, in St. Elisabeth’s “British casualties were in beds with blankets and sheets, and well cared for by Dutch nuns and doctors.” Warning Kessel to be prepared for a heavy flow of casualties, the two men returned to Oosterbeek, just in time, Warrack recalls, “to step into a packet of mortaring near the Tafelberg.”
At 3 P.M. the partial truce began. The firing suddenly diminished and then stopped altogether. Lance Bombardier Percy Parkes, for whom the “overwhelming noise had become normal, found the silence so unreal that for a second I thought I was dead.” With British and German medical officers and orderlies supervising the moves, ambulances and jeeps from both sides began loading casualties. Sergeant Dudley R. Pearson, the 4th Parachute Brigade’s chief clerk, was put beside his Brigadier’s stretcher on a jeep. “So you got it too, Pearson,” said Hackett. Pearson was wearing only his boots and trousers. His right shoulder was heavily bandaged “where shrapnel had torn a huge hole.” Hackett was gray-faced and obviously in great pain from his stomach wound. As they moved off toward Arnhem, Hackett said, “Pearson, I hope you won’t think I’m pulling rank, but I think I’m a bit worse off than you are. At the hospital do you mind if they get to me first?”*
Lieutenant Pat Glover, who had jumped with Myrtle the “parachick,” was moved to St. Elisabeth’s in agony. A bullet had severed two veins in his right hand and on the way to the Schoonoord dressing station he was hit again by shrapnel in the right calf. There was so little morphia that he was told he could not be given a shot unless he deemed it absolutely necessary. Glover did not ask for any. Now, sleeping fitfully, he found himself thinking of Myrtle. He could not remember what day she had been killed. During the fighting he and his batman, Private Joe Scott, had traded Myrtle’s satchel back and forth. Then, in a slit trench under fire, Glover suddenly realized that Myrtle’s bag was not there. “Where’s Myrtle?” he had yelled to Scott. “She’s up there, sir.” Scott pointed to the top of Glover’s trench. Inside her bag, Myrtle lay on her back, feet in the air. During the night Glover and Scott buried the chicken in a shallow little grave near a hedge. As Scott brushed earth over the spot, he looked at Glover and said, “Well, Myrtle was game to the last, sir.” Glover remembered he had not taken off Myrtle’s parachute wings. Now, in a haze of pain, he was glad that he had buried her with honor and properly—with her badge of rank—as befitted those who died in action.
At the Schoonoord, Hendrika van der Vlist watched as German orderlies began to move casualties out. Suddenly firing began. One of the Germans yelled, “If it does not stop we will open fire and not a casualty, a doctor or a nurse will come out alive.” Hendrika paid no attention. “It is always the youngest soldiers who yell the loudest,” she noted, “and we’re used to the German threats by now.” The firing ceased and the loading continued.
Several times again firing broke out as the long lines of walking wounded and convoys of jeeps, ambulances and trucks moved out toward Arnhem. “Inevitably,” General Urquhart recalled, “there were misunderstandings. It is not easy to still a battle temporarily.” Doctors at the Tafelberg had “some uneasy moments as they cleared combative Germans off the premises.” And nearly everyone remembers that the recently arrived Poles could not understand the necessity for the partial cease-fire. “They had many old scores to settle,” says Urquhart, “and saw no legitimate reason for holding their fire.” Ultimately, they were “prevailed upon to curb their eagerness until the evacuation was completed.”
Major Skalka, along with Dr. Warrack, kept the convoys moving throughout the afternoon. Some 200 walking wounded were led out and more than 250 men were carried in the medical convoys. “I have never seen anything like the conditions at Ooster-beek,” Skalka says. “It was nothing but death and wreckage.”
At St. Elisabeth’s, Lieutenant Peter Stainforth, recovering from a chest wound received in Arnhem, heard the first walking wounded coming in. “I felt a shiver of excitement run up my spine,” he says. “I have never been so proud. They came in and the rest of us were horror-stricken. Every man had a week’s growth of beard. Their battle dress was torn and stained; and filthy, blood-soaked bandages poked out from all of them. The most compelling thing was their eyes—red-rimmed, deep-sunk, peering out from drawn, mud-caked faces made haggard by lack of sleep, and yet they walked in undefeated. They looked fierce enough to take over the place right then and there.”
As the last convoy left Oosterbeek, Warrack thanked the SS medical officer for his help. “Skalka looked me in the eye and said, ‘Can I have that in writing?’ ” Warrack ignored the remark. At 5 P.M. the battle began again as though it had never stopped.
At Lance Bombardier Percy Parkes’s gun position near the Dolderen laundry, “all hell broke loose again. The Jerries threw everything at us.” After the relative quiet during the evacuation of the wounded, Parkes felt a sense of relief. “Everything had returned to normal, and I could orient to that. I was back in business again.” Germans, taking advantage of the temporary truce, had infiltrated many areas. Men heard screaming and firing from all directions as Germans and British chased one another through streets and gardens. From his trench Parkes saw a tank coming across a cabbage patch toward battery headquarters. Two artillerymen sprinted for a 6-pounder on the road. As the troopers began to fire, Parkes looked up in amazement as cabbages began to sail over his trench.
“The force of the gun was sucking up the cabbages, pulling them right out of the ground and hurling them through the air. Then there was a tremendous bang and we saw a shell hit the tank.”
Major Robert Cain heard someone yell, “Tigers!” and he raced for the small antitank gun set up alongside a building in his block. A gunner ran up the street to help him. Together the two men rolled the gun into position. “Fire!” Cain shouted. He saw that the shell had hit the tank, disabling it. “Let’s have another go to be sure,” he yelled. The gunner looked at Cain and shook his head. “Can’t, sir,” he said. “She’s finished. The recoil mechanism’s gone.”
Inside the Ter Horst house the noise was so loud that everyone was numbed and deafened. Suddenly Kate ter Horst felt “a tremendous shock. There was a thunder of bricks. Timbers cracked and there were stifled cries from all sides.” The force of the explosion had jammed the cellar door. In the choking dust that swirled through the little room, she heard “men working with spades and tools … sawing and the breaking of timbers … footsteps crunching through bricks and mortar … and heavy things dragged back and forth.” The cellar door was broken open and fresh air poured in. Upstairs Kate saw that part of the corridor and the garden room were open to the outdoors and a section of one wall had been blown in. Men lay everywhere, tossed about by the explosion. Dr. Martin had been hit again and was unable to get about at all. A soldier who had been brought in several days earlier suffering from shell shock roamed through the carnage in the house. Staring at Kate ter Horst, he said, “I think I’ve seen you someplace before.” Gently she led him to the cellar and found room for him on the stone floor. Almost immediately he fell asleep. Wakening later, he moved over to Mrs. ter Horst. “We can be taken at any moment now,” he said quietly. He went to sleep again. Leaning tiredly against a wall, her five children beside her, Kate waited, as “the ghastly hours stretched slowly.”
In a trench not far from Major Cain’s position, Sergeant Alf Roullier saw another tank appear in the street. He and a gunner dashed to the only antitank gun that seemed to be left in the artillery troop he was with. The two men reached the gun just as the tank turned toward them. They fired and saw a flash as the tank was hit. At that moment a machine gun opened up. The gunner with Roullier gasped and sagged against him. As Roullier turned to ease the man down, a bullet tore into his left hand. It began to shake uncontrollably and Roullier assumed the bullet had hit a nerve. Easing the gunner over his back, Roullier made it to his trench. “I’ll go get help,” he told the bloodstained trooper. At the Ter Horst house Roullier stopped, unwilling to go in. He heard men screaming and babbling, begging for water, crying out the names of relatives. “Oh, God!” Roullier said. “What have I come here for?” Bombardier E. C. Bolden appeared at that moment. “Blimey, mate,” Bolden said, looking at Roullier’s shaking hand, “you been out typewriting?” Roullier explained that he had come for help for the wounded gunner. “All right,” Bolden said, bandaging Roullier’s hand, “I’ll get there.” Returning to his position, Roullier passed the Ter Horst garden and stopped, staring in horror. He had never seen so many dead in one place before. Some had smocks over their faces but others were uncovered and “their eyes stared off in all directions.” There were piles of dead, so many that a man could not step between them.
At the trench Roullier waited until Bolden arrived with two stretcher-bearers. “Don’t worry,” Bolden told Roullier. He raised his thumb. “Everything will be O.K.” Roullier didn’t think so. Back in England, the thirty-one-year-old trooper had pleaded to go on the mission. His age was against it, and although Roullier was an artilleryman, he had become acting mess sergeant. But he had won out, and finally had been allowed to go. Now, staring at the tired, thirsty, hungry troopers around him, he remembers that “something clicked in my mind. I just forgot the battle. I was obsessed with getting us something to eat.” He does not know how long he crawled through torn-up gardens and half-demolished houses in the area, ransacking shelves and searching cellars for bits and pieces of food. Someplace he found an undamaged galvanized tub. Into it he threw everything he found—a few withered carrots, some onions, a bag of potatoes, salt and some bouillon cubes. Near the house he found a chicken coop. Only one bird was still alive. Roullier took it along.
On the stone floor of a ruined house he built a circle of bricks to hold the tub. Tearing strips of wallpaper off walls and using pieces of wood, he built a fire. He does not remember the battle still raging in the streets as he made one more trip outside to find water—but he staggered back with the tub partly filled. He killed and plucked the chicken, and dropped it into the tub. Just at dusk when he decided the stew was finished he pulled a pair of curtains off a window frame to wrap the hot handles of the pot and, with the help of another trooper, set out for the trenches. For the first time in hours he was aware of mortars coming in. The two men moved at intervals, stopping at each near burst, then going on again. At the artillery position, Roullier yelled out, “Come and get it!” Amazed, bleary troopers appeared in cautious groups with battered ration cans and mess kits. Dazedly mumbling their thanks, they dipped into the hot tub and disappeared into the growing darkness. In ten minutes the stew was gone. Peering into the bottom of the tub, Alf Roullier could just make out a few small chunks of potatoes. He picked them out and, for the first time that day, ate some food. He had never felt happier.
On the grounds of the Hartenstein Hotel in a five-man trench, Sergeant Leonard Overton, the glider pilot, stared out into the growing dusk. The four men who shared his trench had disappeared. Suddenly Overton saw dark shapes approaching. “It’s only us,” someone said quietly. As the four soldiers dropped into the trench, Overton saw that they carried a gas cape bundled together. Carefully the men opened the cape and, holding a can at one edge, emptied almost a pint of rain water into the container. One man produced a cube of tea and began to stir the liquid. Overton looked on, dazed. “We had had nothing to eat or drink that day and only two hard biscuits which we had shared on Saturday,” he says. Then, to Overton’s surprise, the troopers offered the tin can to him. He took a sip and passed it on. “Many happy returns,” each man told him softly. Overton had forgotten that Sunday, September 24, was his twenty-third birthday.
In the Schoonoord the critical cases and the walking wounded were gone, but shell-shocked men still lingered in the big hotel. As Chaplain Pare walked through a half-deserted room, he heard a thin shaking voice somewhere in the echoing building singing “Just a song at twilight.” Climbing to an upstairs room, Pare knelt beside a badly shocked young trooper. “Padre,” the boy said, “will you tuck me in? I get so frightened with all the noise.” Pare had no blanket but he pretended to cover the trooper. “That feels fine, Padre. I feel very well now. Will you do me one more favor?” Pare nodded. “Say the Lord’s Prayer with me.” Pare did. He soothed back the young man’s hair. “Now close your eyes,” Pare told him. “Sleep well. God bless you.” The trooper smiled. “Good night, Padre. God bless you.” Two hours later a medic came for Pare. “You know that lad you said the prayers with?” Pare asked, “What’s wrong?” The medic shook his head. “He died just now. He said to tell you he couldn’t stand the noise outside.”
As evening set in, Colonel R. Payton-Reid in the KOSB’s area of the perimeter was not unhappy to see “the twenty-fourth grow to its melancholy close. The high hopes of early support by the ground forces was a subject now, by mutual consent, taboo.”
Late Sunday night Lieutenant Neville Hay, the Phantom Net operator, was called into General Urquhart’s room in the cellar of the Hartenstein. “He handed me a long message,” Hay says, “and told me when I had finished encoding it to return it to him. I remember him saying that perhaps by that time he wouldn’t have to send it.” Hay was stunned as he read the message. “What it really meant was that they had to come and get us or we would be wiped out.” Hay encoded the signal and returned it to Urqu-hart. “I hoped he wouldn’t have to send it, either,” Hay says. As sent out, th
e message read:
Urquhart to Browning. Must warn you unless physical contact is made with us early 25 Sept. consider it unlikely we can hold out long enough. All ranks now exhausted. Lack of rations, water, ammunition and weapons with high officer casualty rate. Even slight enemy offensive action may cause complete disintegration. If this happens all will be ordered to break toward bridgehead if anything rather than surrender. Any movement at present in face of enemy impossible. Have attempted our best and will do so as long as possible.*
Over two consecutive nights, attempts to move men and supplies into Urquhart’s lodgment had failed. Yet the stubborn XXX Corps commander, General Horrocks, refused to abandon the effort. If the bridgehead was to be saved and the relief of Urquhart’s men effected, it must take place this Sunday night. Once again the weather was unfavorable; no help could be expected from England-based planes flying supply or support missions. But troops were now in strength in the Driel-Nijmegen area, and Horrocks—achieving the near-impossible by driving his entire corps up the narrow, one-tank-wide corridor to his spear-point on the Rhine—was obsessed by the 400 yards of river that separated him from the airborne forces. Success was tantalizingly close. He ordered General Thomas’ 43rd Wessex to make one last push: with the remaining Poles, troops of Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Tilly’s 4th Dorsets would assault the river and try to cross into the bridgehead beginning at 10 P.M.
A Bridge Too Far Page 53
