Captain George Merz USAAF recalled: ‘After we were shot down we stayed at the Veldhoven farm for three weeks until German troops came to be billeted there. We were taken to an asylum at Remmerstein but after three days the Germans moved in, so, with the mental patients, we had to depart and returned to our farmhouse, as their unwelcome guests had left. The next day came orders for the escape plan. We cycled to Bennekom and were hidden in a cemetery, sleeping in a burial chamber. Six days later word came that we were leaving and two Dutch ladies on bicycles led us along a route, infested with Germans, to the ‘Pegasus I’ RV area.’
The group from the forester’s hut at Oud Reemst and from Mossel, now in uniform and armed, were brought down in two very noisy charcoal-burning Red Cross lorries by ‘Wolff’ Horstman. Lying flat in two layers under potato sacks the evaders had a long and uncomfortable ride via Ede, Bennekom and Renkum to the RV, passing through several German check points.
Major Tony Hibbert: ‘As we lay on the floor of the trucks under a covering of potato sacks, Wolff Horstman and his drivers took us all the way to the RV in the woods near Renkum. He was stopped twice by German posts, but managed to talk his way through. Just before dusk we stopped by the side of a road about a mile from the river. I went round the back of the truck, saying, ‘Every one out and keep bloody quiet, there are Germans all around’. Needless to say, there was much fucking and blinding as they clambered out of the trucks after a most uncomfortable ride. As this was going on a German patrol cycled past, ringing their bells and shouting ‘Raus, Raus’; and everyone stepped back politely and let them pass. We were led off down a path through the woods until we came to a clearing, where we met the rest of the escape party, about 120 in all. We had to wait here until about 9 pm when the moon came up.’
By dark about 140 men were at the RV, mostly airborne soldiers but with a number of British and American aircrew, Dutch patriots wishing to join their Army, one American airborne soldier and three Russians. They were organized into sections and platoons under the officers and NCOs. Uniforms and arms were issued. Sentries were posted. Some of the men, due to long confinement, were unfit and tired and some had not quite recovered from wounds. A hot meal prepared by the Dutch helped to put fresh heart into all. Orders were given out by Tatham-Warter.
The moon rose at 2100 and half an hour later Tom Wainwright led off at the head of the first platoon, which was better armed. Maarten van den Bent guided as far as the ONO barn, where Wainwright took over, with Digby Tatham-Warter. Sergeant Major Grainger followed at the rear of the platoon, with Tony Hibbert as a back-up in case of trouble ahead. The rest followed in double file through the dark woods, with strict orders to keep quiet as the route ran right through the German front-line positions. At times the sounds of their troops talking and coughing could be heard close to the track. It was vital for every man to keep in touch with the one ahead, but this was difficult as they pushed through hedges and in and out of ditches.
Major Digby Tatham-Warter: ‘Brigadier Lathbury had delegated command of the party to me... Although I had stressed the importance of moving silently, it was obvious that we were making too much noise and the further we went the worse it got... In spite of everything, at 2300 we reached the edge of the woods overlooking the river flats... We shook hands with our brave Dutch guides with whispered thanks and farewells.’50
The German forward defensive positions were south of the road overlooking river flats road. On the far bank were paratroopers of the 2/506 Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st US Airborne Division. During the past few days they had been sending over strong fighting patrols in order to dominate the north bank in this area and to cloak the passage of the large body of evaders when they came through. Artillery was ready to provide supporting fire if the operation got into trouble. The Airborne party now closed up here, with well-armed sections on each flank, front and rear. The party turned west and moved along the river bank. The night was dark, but the far bank of the wide river could just be seen. Tatham-Warter flashed the red light signal, but there was no reply. They waited for the next burst of Bofors fire indicating the crossing point and thus check their position.
Brigadier Lathbury: ‘We flashed the light signal across the river and waited. Nothing happened. There was no sign of boats and no sign of movement anywhere. We waited for an awful 20 minutes or so. When we made the plan I had commented on the difficulty of knowing when you are directly under the fire of a Bofors and I was sure that the fire had crossed the river further downstream. We continued signalling until suddenly a voice came out of the darkness, which said, ‘Are you people by any chance looking for some boats?’ to which Tatham-Warter calmly replied ‘Well, actually we are’.’
It was Lieutenant Leo Heaps, who had escaped from a train en route to Germany, had crossed the river a few weeks previously and had been brought into the team to help the escape plans. He and Dobie had been waiting on the south bank with the assault boats, anxiously looking out for the signal and, seeing a dim signal upstream, they had crossed over to find the airborne party. Heaps on his own walked up the river bank until he met them.
Following him a short way along the river bank, they met Dobie at the crossing point. He signalled to the sappers of the 43rd Wessex Division waiting on the far bank and soon the boats loomed out of the mist. The evaders quickly got into the boats and the first group was paddled across the river. It took two more crossings to evacuate the whole party. A ten-man patrol of American paratroopers came up, quiet and businesslike, to report in and then quickly embarked. Wainwright waited until the end and was the last to cross. Only one man was lost; one of the Russians had disappeared. Maarten van den Bent was one of the Dutch patriots who escaped with this party.
Safe on the far side, they all followed a white tape across the flats to a farmhouse, the HQ of the American parachute battalion. Here they were given tea, rum and buns. Fighting patrols from this battalion had been responsible for softening up the Germans prior to the crossing and thus keeping their heads down. Jeeps and trucks then took them all to Nijmegen, where Dobie had laid on more suitable refreshments, champagne never tasted better and they toasted the brave men, women and children of the Dutch Resistance without whose gallant efforts the escape could never have been achieved. They were the real heroes; they had risked not only their own lives, but those of their families in helping their Airborne friends. But their dangerous work was not yet finished; there were still many more evaders in hiding.
Among them was Sergeant ‘Tex’ Banwell, who had said his goodbyes to Lieutenant Heaps on 1 October and had remained behind to teach the Dutch Resistance how to handle British weapons. On the following day Banwell was given command of the Bren and took part in an ambush of a small German convoy with seven Resistance members, all armed with Stens. Shortly after midnight the vehicles approached the trap, whereupon the headlights of a lorry stolen by the Resistance were switched on in the darkness to blind the driver of the leading vehicle. Banwell calmly pressed his trigger but the Bren jammed, however he was able to clear it and open fire seconds later, killing most of the Germans in the first two vehicles, though in the brief fire-fight one Resistance man was fatally wounded. Inside the Staff car that was hit laid a badly injured German officer beside an envelope marked ‘Streng Geheim’ (Top Secret). The Dutchmen took the envelope and carried their dying comrade and the wounded German back to their shelter, where his wounds were dressed. The leader of the Resistance and Banwell were both in favour of killing this man, though the other Dutchmen were against this and so the German was spared and loaded onto a wheelbarrow, which was abandoned in an obvious place close to an army post. This act of mercy did nothing to deter the German desire for revenge, who on the following day put selected buildings near Putten to the torch, seven men were executed and the 590 males between the ages of 15 and 50 were sent to concentration camps, where only 44 survived. Banwell had been hiding in the concrete cellar of a building that was burned down and when it was safe he took shelter in th
e woods, having almost been suffocated by the smoke. He contacted the Dutch Resistance again and was involved in several more operations with them in Amerongen and Tiel. Though he had the opportunity to return to the Allied lines on several occasions he decided to stay and aid the Resistance, declining a place in ‘Pegasus I’ - the successful evacuation of 139 escaped Airborne troops across the Rhine. However he did try to escape with ‘Pegasus II’ on 18 November, but sadly this mission was a failure and only a few men got away.
In the aftermath of ‘Pegasus II’, Banwell hid in a brickyard at Wageningen with an American pilot whose name he never learned. Though he had a long history in the art of escape and remaining undetected, Banwell knew that he was in trouble. It was bitterly cold and the snow covering the ground would betray any attempt he made to move. On 21 November an SS patrol came to search the brickyard. The American stood up and said ‘I’m an American pilot. Don’t shoot’, but he was gunned down by machine-gun fire and left to die in the snow. Banwell was not harmed and was instead marched to Velp for interrogation though he was so frozen he could barely move. He seemed to be sure of treatment befitting any normal Prisoner of War, however when he was made to strip and it was observed that he wore clean underwear, it was obvious that he had not merely been on the run but had been aided by the Resistance. The Gestapo were called in, who produced a remarkably accurate dossier on Banwell’s military career and transported him by plane to Berlin where he was repeatedly interrogated at Gestapo HQ. He was ordered to reveal the names of the members of the Dutch Resistance he had been in contact with and his refusal to talk led to him twice being brought before a firing squad. However the threat of execution was a bluff which he successfully rode out and so Banwell was sent to sit out the war at Auschwitz concentration camp, where for the next four months he existed on a serving of water and sauerkraut per week. The Red Army reached Auschwitz in March 1945, by which time Banwell’s weight was down to 90lbs, half what it should have been.51
On 15 October, ‘Pat’ Glover’s 34th birthday, he escaped. As he was leaving a fellow officer expressed concern over the fate of the rest of the men in the hospital if he ran, due to the agreement had been reached between the British and the Germans that Apeldoorn would be treated as a hospital and not as a PoW camp on condition that no one attempted to escape. Glover stated that he didn’t give a damn what happened because it was his duty to try to escape, however the officer persisted with his protest until he forced Glover to take another man with him in case there were reprisals. As Glover had planned it, the two men fell into line with the cooks who were marched from the cookhouse at 6pm each night to their cells nearby, but separated from the procession to hide in a shelter close to the cookhouse. They waited here until it was dark and at 1945 Glover ran across to the green and buried himself beneath an enormous Red Cross flag on the ground. The other man was told to follow him 15 minutes later. However he did not turn up, nor did he do so for the further 15 minutes that Glover waited and so as something had clearly gone wrong he pressed on without him. He made it to the edge of the compound where he had to cross a road to reach the wire, however the sentries on the road were too close together for him to have any chance of crossing without being spotted. Glover waited for a while and wondered what he should do, when at last he heard the sound of an aircraft passing low overheard and reasoning that the normal reaction of anyone on the ground would be to look up at it as it went above them, he bolted across the road as it came over and he was not seen. The barbed-wire fence had cans tied to them to serve as an alarm if anyone tempted to cross them, but as well as a pair of wire cutters Glover also had the foresight to bring some string with him to tie the wires together to prevent the cans rattling as he cut through them. Once on the other side he swam across the dyke and, guided by an escape map and compass proceeded to head in a south-westerly direction towards Otterloo.
Moving cautiously, it took him an entire day to find his way around Deelen Aerodrome. He spent most of the time in the woods and when it rained he was in the habit of tying himself to the trunks of trees with a towel to ensure that when he slept it wasn’t on the wet ground. It was on one such occasion that he was scared half to death by the sudden grunting of some pigs that were searching for food. Three or four days after his escape he was tired, cold and in dire need of nourishment when he happened upon a farmhouse and decided to risk asking the owner to spare some food. The man who answered the door initially told Glover to go away, but he had a change of heart and told him to go and hide in the garden, where he was later hidden in a hole in the ground. Three days later a member of the Dutch Resistance came to the farm and briefly interviewed Glover before taking his leave and on the following day another Resistance man came, however this one was armed with a revolver. The man asked who Glover was and demanded the passwords that the Division had used for the first two days of the Operation. Glover thought for a moment and gave him the answers, after which the man gave him a cigarette and a letter from Brigadier Hackett, which offered congratulations on his escape and ordered him to do all that he was told by the Dutch. It became apparent that the Dutchman standing before Glover was no less a man than the mysterious Captain Peter himself.
Not long after, Glover was given a pair of overalls to put on and was informed that he was to be evacuated to the Allied lines immediately - he was just in time to join ‘Pegasus I’; the evacuation of 139 mostly British Airborne troops across the Rhine. As the two men left the farmhouse a German soldier on a motorbike appeared from up the road and for a brief moment it crossed Glover’s mind that Captain Peter may have given him away, however it quickly became clear that the man was lost and stopped only to ask for directions. Glover sat on the back of a bicycle which Captain Peter pedalled and some time later along the road they met a column of 200-300 German soldiers marching towards them. The Dutchman wanted to know if Glover had any weapons handy, but he only had the wire cutters and so they decided to run the gauntlet and hope that they were not challenged. Glover did not mention it, but he noticed that the trouser legs on his overalls had been pushed up and were presently revealing the British Army trousers he wore underneath, however not a single German noticed and they passed unhindered. After a while longer they arrived in the woods where the 138 other men of ‘Pegasus I’ were assembling for the journey to the riverbank. Taken down to the Rhine, Glover was in command of a small group of American servicemen and for their successful evacuation he was awarded the US Bronze Star. He caught the last boat across the river, but they had to turn back because they were so eager to get away that they had left behind the engineer who had guided the boat in. From the southern bank of the Rhine, Glover was taken to a hospital in Nijmegen and at the end of the month all the men from ‘Pegasus I’ were flown back to England. Upon returning home Glover discovered that his wife had given birth to their third child, John Winston, on 24 September.52
The success of ‘Pegasus I’ had tempted the British Intelligence team to try another similar mass escape about a month later - Operation ‘Pegasus II’. The crossing was to take place about four kilometres to the east and with a similar plan, but concentration was in the Ede area, entailing a longer march to the river over two nights, with a day lying up in the woods. The 101st US Airborne Division would again assist in the operation. The party, about 130 strong, under the command of Major Hugh Maguire, HQ 1st Airborne Division, had a larger proportion of non-airborne soldiers: British and American airmen, Dutch doctors and civilians, some of whom were not used to this form of activity. The airborne contingent was also unfit after two months in hiding. On the second night’s march, when still 4 miles from the river, Maguire decided, as time was short, to take a short cut and the column ran into a German heavy artillery position near De Hindenkamp farm. There was some shooting in the woods, the evaders went to ground and cohesion was soon lost. Some pressed on to the river, while others dispersed and were without guides or leaders. The next morning the Germans, with the aid of spotter planes, recaptured some; othe
rs were killed or wounded, but some went back into hiding. With the continued help of the Resistance a few of these eventually succeeded in escaping. No one crossed that night, but seven men managed to cross during the next two nights, of whom one was drowned, together with his Canadian rescuer.
During the bitter winter that followed other escapes were successfully made, with the help of the Resistance, by smaller parties or as individuals, but the crossing points were much further to the west. Among these was Colonel Graeme Warrack who had escaped from Apeldoorn after the last of the wounded under his care had left the hospital; he had also been on the abortive ‘Pegasus II’ attempt.53 Brigadier Shan Hackett, after he had recovered sufficiently from his wounds, in February left the caring De Nooy family in Ede and, guided by the Resistance, bicycled through Holland to the Biesbosch area where he met Graeme Warrack and Captain Lippman Kessel, the surgeon who had saved his life in St. Elizabeth Hospital and other airborne doctors. After a few days they were paddled across the wide network of the river delta to a safe rendezvous with Canadian troops.
In April 1945 Canadian and British troops crossed the Rhine east of Arnhem bridge (destroyed by USAAF bombers on 7 October 1944), to liberate the northern part of Holland. Not long afterwards the Graves Registration units of 2nd British Army moved in to start the difficult task of locating the field graves of all those men known to have been killed, died of wounds or reported as ‘missing believed killed’ and to bring together the remains into a central location. This field, as it was then, was given on perpetual loan by the Netherlands Government to become the Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery, one of the many British cemeteries around the world administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It is more generally known as the Airborne Cemetery.
A Bridge Too Far Page 20
