A Bridge Too Far

by Martin Bowman

  There was an English church in Utrecht and whilst in hospital Dauncey had been visited by the friendly Breuning family who lived in the Parsonage next door to it and believing that they would aid them he decided to call upon them, but first had to find out where the church was. ‘We took a risk early and tapped on a door to ask where the church was. It was opened by a man who was absolutely terrified at the sight of us and rushed out into the night. His wife, however, was a very different calibre and agreed to take us to our intended destination as long as we promised to walk at least fifty yards behind her. Once we approached the church she left and we made our way to the Parsonage, where we were warmly greeted by my friends Paul and Constance Breuning and their three younger children. Dr Breuning brought out a half bottle of champagne that he had been keeping until the Allied victory, which I thought was a great compliment. The relief at reaching a safe haven was unbelievable. Little did we know then that we would spend the next two months there. Their hospitality knew no bounds. At Christmas time we had a great feast which I secretly learned afterwards was their pet white rabbit. They didn’t tell the children about it, although they may have guessed as its disappearance coincided suspiciously with Christmas. The Breunings were generally very short of food. I can even remember going up into the attic and spending quite a while brushing up dried peas which had fallen out of a bag.

  ‘Most of the time was spent in our room and we played an enormous amount of bridge, which Gordon was incredibly good at. He could remember each hand for a long time afterwards and the morning after would tell me what I should have done. Apart from that, we just used to talk. Somehow the Breunings had acquired a copy of a menu from a well-known restaurant called Simpsons-in-the-Strand and we spent day after day discussing what we would choose. A doctor used to come regularly to check on Gordon’s progress. A rather clever ruse on the part of the Breunings was that they made out the children had measles which explained the doctor’s regular visits and also had the effect of stopping people from coming around. They were incredibly brave because, if the Germans had come round to the place, there is no doubt that Paul Breuning would have been shot and his wife would probably have been put in prison. The only thing they expected us to do was to get out through an upper window and into the garden if the enemy did come around.’

  During their stay with the Breunings, Dauncey and Cunningham learned that the Germans had been greatly angered by their escape and had severely punished at least one of the orderlies and three sentries at the hospital. A massive search for the two men ensued until one day the Germans publicly announced that Dauncey and Cunningham had been recaptured and shot.

  ‘I was rather upset about this but the Underground thought it was absolutely terrific because it was an acknowledgement that they hadn’t been able to find us and that they intended to waste no more time looking. In fact the Breunings had to work very hard to make contact the Underground because security was terribly tight. In the meantime Dr Breuning had managed to get us two identity cards complete with passport photos. I was called Peter Bos and was meant to be a doctor who was deaf and dumb and some eight years older than I really was. I found it an unlikely combination but I suppose it was better than nothing at all. He also arranged, or perhaps I should say stole, two bicycles which at the time were very prized bits of apparatus because petrol was virtually non-existent. It was decided that we weren’t going to do a big hook through other parts of the country. Our escape route was a straight line into the Allied sector. The whole thing sounded very simple as long as we evaded the Germans at awkward places. As the weeks turned into months, we got more and more buoyed up and the second month seemed to be endless.’

  After bidding farewell to their generous hosts, Dauncey and Cunningham at last were able to proceed with their escape plan, led by two young Dutch women on bicycles. ‘As we hadn’t been out for some two months our cycling was somewhat shaky at the beginning and Gordon found using his leg muscles quite an effort. The girls were very pretty and tended to attract the eye the German soldiers so we just sailed on in their wake. I was wearing rather funny clothes - an old hat, a pink scarf which stood out a mile and black winklepicker shoes. I rather wondered if my garb didn’t have the effect of drawing attention to myself rather than merging with the crowd. I decided I would wear my identity discs around my neck as it would be less easy for the Germans to prove I was a spy if I did get caught. By the end of the first day, we got to a little river called the Lek, left our bicycles there and got across on a small boat, where we were greeted by some other Dutchmen.

  ‘The Underground meticulously organized our escape. It wasn’t long before we were manoeuvring within six to eight miles of the front line and of course the quantity of enemy troops in the region intensified. The key was to keep moving and we often just stopped at different little farms, houses and flats for a night before being moved on. This of course required a great deal of effort from the Underground who not only had to organize it but also had to ensure we were fed and so on. We stayed at one large farm in a village called Culemborg for some time. It employed a number of farm workers so we were able to merge in, although most days were spent hiding inside. Every evening, though, we all sat around this enormous kitchen and had the most wonderful food. German soldiers would occasionally pop in to ask for eggs, but we were told not to take any notice and just to laugh when the other labourers did. It worked marvellously and we got on very well with the labourers, not least because they loved cards and we introduced Pontoon to them which they couldn’t get enough of. Indeed, some time after the war, my wife Marjorie and I came back to Culemborg to try and find the farm, which we did and we were met by one of these labourers who roared with laughter and shouted, ‘Twist, Bust!’

  Ten days later, they were moved nearer to the Allied lines, to a small town called Buren. ‘Here we were joined by two US pilots and two other chaps and together we set out that night with the aim of crossing the Waal which would have got us to the other side. As we reached our crossing point, the Underground rushed us back with the news that the Germans had a troop movement in the area where they had planned. The crossing was therefore cancelled and we were taken to another farm, where we were all put up in a loft. There was further trouble the following morning when one of the US pilots came over and informed us that he believed that one of his fellow pilots was a fraud. He smelt a rat after hearing the chap talk about England, where he had said he’d been based, because he couldn’t answer some fairly elementary questions about the place. This was serious because the Underground were afraid that he may have infiltrated some of their escape routes. In fact it was later discovered that he was a Dutchman who just wanted to get out of occupied Holland, but it was a rather eerie moment.’

  On the following day, Dauncey was taken into Buren where he used an Underground radio transmitter, brought forth by a woman on a bicycle. ‘I spoke to one of the British OP aeroplanes who wanted to know a bit more about us and about what we were proposing to do. I think the British wished to know that the people the Dutch wanted to get over were in fact Allies and not infiltrators. In order to talk on this thing you had to wind it up, which seemed to make an enormous noise and I felt conscious that every German could hear it all around. Anyway, as soon as we’d finished, this girl packed up the radio and disappeared. I thought it was incredibly brave of her.’

  Before making another attempt to cross into the Allied lines, Dauncey and Cunningham were moved again to a church in Asch. ‘It wasn’t long before the boredom and the constant midges got to us as we crouched in this small dusty hideout. One day, instead of staying up in the church, we went down to the main body of it when there was a sudden noise. We leapt into a broom cupboard and just hoped whoever had entered would go away. To our dismay the door opened and there in front of us stood a local priest. Unable to think about what to do, we just bowed to him and made our way back to the hideout at the top of the building. To our embarrassment, the Underground informed us the next day that he was fu
rious and had told them that it was quite wrong for a church to be used for that purpose and that we must leave immediately. Whilst working at another farm, I and a member of the Underground went for a swim in a river. I think he must have thought I needed freshening up. At that moment a German sentry with his rifle slung over his shoulder came by and the Dutch Underground man shouted something at him, which was obviously quite witty because the German roared with laughter. I started laughing too and off he went. It once again showed me that, if you just keep calm, you could get away with the most extraordinary things.’ 40

  Wounded in the arm, Jimmy Cleminson had sat out the remainder of the battle in the home of Kate ter Horst and was among many who were left behind. ‘There was a very eerie silence the following morning’ he recalled. ‘None of knew what in fact had happened. One of our doctors came along and told us that our soldiers had withdrawn over the Rhine and that we would be taken to a German hospital. That was a horrible feeling because it was totally unexpected. But it was a very a lonely feeling when you were abandoned.’ 41

  Together with John Frost, Cleminson was moved to the Lazaret (Prisoner of War hospital) at Obermassfeldt, where he remained until men of General Patton’s 6th US Army entered the area. Upon arriving in London, Cleminson and Frost had a meal in the West End with two other officers. The quartet looked very peculiar, wearing their ragged and torn battledress and each man sporting a wound of some kind. Cleminson had his wounded arm, Frost limped on his ankle and both George Comper and Peter Clegg had wounds to their throat, through which food was prone to trickling through. In the summer of 1945 Major General Urquhart was in need of a new aide-de-camp and Jimmy Cleminson’s name entered his head. He could not have been too offended by his ‘damned silly’ moustache after all.

  Tuesday 26th September was the second Tuesday that John Slatterley spent in hospital. ‘Just after six o’ clock in the evening when the three sisters in our ward, (the nurses were all called sisters), quickly cleaned the supper implements away, more quickly than usual, I asked the reason and was told ‘more Germans are coming to see you and don’t bother us we are busy’. The latter remark was spoken quite good-humouredly as in jest. My bed was the first on the left as one entered the ward and invariably any persons, German and Dutch, coming in to do a round would start from the right; consequently I was always the last man to be approached and this Tuesday evening the order was as before. At half past six the ward doors opened and in stepped six of the most elegantly dressed German officers I had yet seen. Usually the visiting officers wore their caps and sometimes, mackintoshes or overcoats, but these men looked as though they had just stepped from a mess room and were entering the ward for an after dinner drink. Immaculate was the only word to describe them, from head to foot they were perfect.

  ‘The first to enter gave us their usual all time greeting ‘Heil Hitler’ and then stepped back slightly to let this jack booted superior enter, a tall man with a slight limp, wearing rimless spectacles, with his hair cropped short in a crew cut. As they started the round, scent pervaded over everything, the hospital smell vanished and there was the strange sister assisted the officers, pulling back bed covers, which moments before had meticulously straightened, to allow wounds and leg contraptions to be viewed.

  ‘I watched the entourage stop at each bed, their chief asking questions in German which was translated to the man in the bed and the answers retranslated back into German. He looked sympathetic nodding his head quite often as though agreeing with the replies. Then they came to me, seeming relieved that the round was over, questions were few, but just as they turned to go the senior officer touched my wounded leg and glanced again at the wounds, with the puss flowing quite freely from them. ‘Pain’, he asked in English and then they were gone. Shortly afterwards one of the sisters came into the ward with four bottles of Advocaat, which had been sent to us by the high ranking officer with his compliments, ‘Who was he?’ I asked. ‘He seemed quite a gentleman’.

  ‘That man’ she replied softly ‘is our German governor of Holland’.

  This then was Seuss Inquaart, who had become governor of Austria at the time of the Anschluss and then with the Dutch people. Shortly after his visit to us, this eminent man was to have 100 hostages shot on the Arnhem-Apeldoorn road, on the very spot where an ambush by the underground on the Dutch collaborator Rueter failed. This gentleman was to be tried after the war at Nuremberg as one of the principal Nazi criminals tried, condemned and executed for his crimes against humanity.’

  Corporal Walter Collings, who was taken prisoner on Wednesday the 27th still not knowing that the divisional survivors had crossed back over the Rhine, discovered that not all the SS were as bad. ‘I had my leg dressed by one of our orderlies before being captured. Most of the mopping up had been done by then by the Germans. I was treated well by our captors and given a cigarette by the officer who said ‘Well done’ and shook my hand. Being a non-smoker I found the cigarette very relaxing. I was taken by one of our jeeps, driven by a German, to the Hotel Schoonoord - first aid post. On our way there I saw a jeep full of Germans blown up by some of our lads. Gunfire was still going on in the area from troops like ourselves who had no idea of the evacuation. I was put into an ambulance with five other wounded and we were last in a convoy of ambulances. Temptation was too much for the driver and his mate. They stopped at some wrecked shops in Oosterbeek and looted as much as they could but by that time, they had lost the convoy so they headed into Germany, stopped at a house and gave the loot to friends. They then took us to a German front line first aid station, a church, with beds about a foot apart. We were put at one end. There was already a very badly wounded RAF air gunner in one of the beds and German wounded were being brought in and out all the time. Our wounds were not treated whilst we were there. The nicest gesture was that one of the German wounded walked along the bottom of our beds and dropped a cigarette on each one. We were moved from there to an interrogation centre where all I gave was rank, name and number.’

  The British wounded, who had not already been evacuated during the brief ceasefire, were picked up from the dressing stations and from many houses and taken by German ambulances and lorries to the Konigh Willem III Barracks at Apeldoorn, where the Airborne medical staff had set up what was virtually a British military hospital, but under German guard; others were taken to civilian and German military hospitals in Arnhem and Apeldoorn. From there, two days later, those who were fit to travel were driven to the railway station en route to Stalag XIB at Fallingbostel. Fred Moore was among them. 42

  Over the weeks to come these men, as they became fit to travel, were transported by rail into Germany to prison camps or hospitals. Most of the men taken prisoner earlier in the battle had been quickly marched off and taken by rail and truck into Germany, but some had managed to escape either by jumping from the cattle trucks or lorries, or from the line of march. Some of the walking wounded had escaped from the German-held dressing stations or hospitals and from the Airborne hospital at Apeldoorn there was soon a steady trickle of men slipping out to avoid being transported to prison camp. There were also others who had evaded capture during the battle and were in hiding awaiting their chance to get across the river.

  On Tuesday afternoon a German doctor had examined ‘Tex’ Banwell’s wounds to his fingers, treated them and applied a clean bandage. The next day Banwell fell in line with a large group of airborne prisoners being marched in the direction of a PoW compound, established in a warehouse at Stroe, 15 miles from Arnhem. At the camp he met up with Staff Sergeant Alan Kettley of the Glider Pilot Regiment and shortly after Lieutenant Leo Heaps, a Canadian officer attached to the 1st Battalion. Heaps had little success in finding others in the camp who were willing to risk their lives to escape, however he noticed Banwell and Kettley displaying a little more than passing interest in the perimeter fence. By that evening the three men had formed a plan of escape and gathered what equipment they had to hand - an escape map that was too small to be of any use, a
button compass, Kettley’s nail clippers, a tin of chocolate, a box of matches and a grey German Army blanket. The men in the camp were to be shipped to PoW camps via railway. However officers, NCOs and other ranks were to be kept apart. Heaps left the officers compound and fell in with Banwell and Kettley, where he pretended to be a Sergeant and for the moment he was not missed by the German guards. Together, they and other prisoners were marched to a railway siding where they were crammed into cattle cars. Once inside Kettley got out his nail clippers and began to work away at the porthole-shaped window to remove the glass, a task he had completed in a matter of minutes. He then used his clippers to saw through the meshed barbed wire on the other side of the porthole. Once achieved, Heaps put his arm through, grabbed the other side of the porthole and made several attempts to tear it from its fixings. Eventually he had unhinged a section of wood three feet wide and 18 inches high. The three men jumped off the train and into the clear and moonless night. Only one other man in the cattle car asked if he could go with them, but he had a serious leg wound and so they had to leave him behind.

  By morning on 30 September they had made significant progress but came to a halt at the first sign of daylight to rest beneath the German Army blanket, which offered them some shelter from the biting cold. Later in the morning they could see a small wooden cottage ahead of them with smoke coming from the chimney. The prospect of heat was considerably attractive to them at this time and so they knocked on the door and after several minutes the door was nervously opened to reveal an elderly lady and two young children. She could not speak any English, but Banwell attempted to convey who they were with some improvised sign language, to which the lady smiled and invited them in where they were served small cups of hot milk before they took their leave a few minutes later. Having travelled several miles further they were beckoned into a farmhouse by two Dutch women who gave them civilian clothing and prepared a comparative feast, having gone 10 days without a satisfactory meal, of fried eggs, bread and cheese. As they were finishing their meal in walked Piet Oosterbroek, a member of the Dutch Resistance, who shook them by the hand. He had heard of their presence from the old lady in the wooden cottage, who had misunderstood Banwell’s sign language and had been under the impression that they were German soldiers who had deserted. Oosterbroek had no doubt that they were really escaped Airborne soldiers and so tracked them down to offer them shelter in the hay loft of his own farm, close to the village of Putten.