by John Nichol
The centre of Oosterbeek was now filling with British troops. What impressed Marie-Anne as she joined the crowds welcoming them was the sheer number of the soldiers and how well equipped they were, not just arriving on foot but with jeeps and tracked vehicles. ‘All the jeeps have radios, the long aerials swishing behind.’ Kate ter Horst marvelled at the ‘impossible, incredible’ sight of the British on the streets of her town, ‘like a long green serpent, a couple of yards between each of them. One gives a jolly laugh from under his helmet and spreads out his arms. “Give me a kiss!” he says and then he is gone. Behind him they come in endless files, with a rhythmical movement.’ The steady march of the paras was an eye-opener to a people weary of jackboots. ‘We are so accustomed to the noisy marching of the Germans that we stare and stare at soldiers who are not marching and yet proceed in perfect order. Big fellows in khaki coats with countless pockets, which absorb the apples and tomatoes we offer them. Orange streamers and flags, flowers and cheering, people embracing each other in joy.’ A church bell, which the Germans had missed when they were seizing metal to be sent back to the weapons factories in the Ruhr, began to ring, pushed to and fro by two villagers with their feet because there was no rope.
For the soldiers, the heroes’ welcome they received that day was unforgettable, though tinged with the realization that they still had a job to do. Ted Mordecai would have relished the mugs of beer that a joyful innkeeper was handing out but he was ordered to refuse and settle for a cup of ersatz coffee instead. A clear head was needed for the march to Arnhem. But this was still a moment to savour. A soldier bent down and beckoned Anje to come up and sit on top of his tank. Embarrassed and shy though she was, she did. ‘We all shout and dance and we are so gay, all of us. A woman is running backwards and forwards getting the signatures of all the English soldiers for her guest book. She takes pictures of everybody. A friend of my mother’s comes along, her arms full of orange flags, which she distributes to us, and we wave them and laugh and are so happy. But still …’ She could hear shooting, some of it quite close. Ignore it, she told herself. ‘We don’t think about taking cover or going away. Why should we? The jubilation grows and grows.’ For now, the Oosterbeekers could sleep easily, for the first time in four years, ‘calmly and quietly and without apprehension’, as Kate ter Horst put it. In her house the secret trapdoor to a hiding place did not have to be left open, ready for a hasty retreat. ‘No raids to fear. We need not sleep with half an ear open for the ring at the door. Tonight my husband is safe. There are no Huns any more.’
No Huns any more? That was not Andy Milbourne’s experience as he tried to make progress towards Arnhem through the woods and country roads north of Oosterbeek. Things hadn’t got much better since he had fled from some unexpected and frighteningly accurate machine-gun fire on the edge of the landing zone. Now more machine-gun nests and hidden snipers were blocking the way forward. The airborne battalions had a number of designated routes into Arnhem but some were proving far from easy to progress along. What had begun as a confident march to a quick victory was, for the likes of Milbourne, turning into a crawl, down on the ground ‘Indian style and cursing furiously at the grenades and other implements of war hanging from my belt and digging into my flesh’. It was all he could do to erect the tripod he was dragging behind him, clamp the legs tight and mount his machine gun. He let off a burst of bullets – ‘my first at Arnhem’ – and ducked as it was returned, with interest. ‘The very blades of grass were being nipped in two.’ He gave the rest of the platoon covering fire as it charged and silenced the enemy gun.
But this was just one obstacle of many in their way. It was becoming evident that virtually every bush and clump of trees would have to be cleared – and all the time the minutes were ticking away if they were to get even close to Arnhem and their objective. Success in this operation had always depended on everything going like clockwork. There was little margin for error. Yet right from the start it was going wrong. They were also taking casualties. He saw two medics bending over the body of ‘one of our boys’ prone in the middle of a crossroads. He was beyond help, and all they could do was remove his ID tag and leave the body. As dusk fell, the fighting in those nightmarish woods continued, getting fiercer all the time. ‘Groans and shrieks of pain filled the air. Everywhere we turned or moved, we were swept with a withering fire. Dead lay all around, wounded were crying for water. As best we could we attended to the wounded, at the same time pumping everything we had into a determined and reckless foe.’ Nor were the Germans simply digging in and defending what they held. They were also coming out aggressively on the attack. ‘Time and again they overran our positions and had to be driven out with bayonets.’ His gun got so hot that he burnt himself when his bare flesh accidentally touched it.
Fred Moore’s progress was less bloody but just as slow. Fits and starts. Taking cover. The sound of furious gun battles ahead. ‘This was not according to plan.’ He looked at his watch and realized they were already behind schedule. ‘We should by now be advancing rapidly through the outskirts of Arnhem and joining up with the other battalions as we neared the objective.’ Instead they were stuck in the woods – and woods, moreover, in which there was no clear battlefront but different bodies of men, some German, some British, moving uncertainly through the darkness. He saw and heard the enemy in the undergrowth to his left, but made the wise decision to let them go. To engage them would sacrifice precious time and lives – the two elements on which the Battle of Arnhem, now beginning to be fought in real earnest, would pivot.
The crucial development causing all this was that, after exiting Oosterbeek at high speed, his abandoned lunch still on the table at the Tafelberg, Model, the German commander, had passed through Arnhem and established his headquarters 20 miles to the east of the city. There he rallied his forces and drew up plans. He had realized that the aim of the operation was not to grab him but the bridge at Arnhem, and this was confirmed as reports came in of an intelligence coup. The singed remains of written orders outlining part of the Market Garden air operation had been found on the body of a dead American officer pulled from the wreckage of a glider shot down not long after it passed over the Dutch coast on its way to Nijmegen. The Germans had no trouble recognizing the Allies’ plan to lay down an airborne carpet over rivers and canals. It was the same one that the Wehrmacht had employed when invading the Netherlands four years earlier, except from the opposite direction.
Model took overall charge. The Prussian-born soldier was in his element. He was not from the same mould as field marshals like Rommel, never happier than when on the offensive. But Model was unsurpassed when it came to defence strategy. He had proved this on the eastern front, where his leadership and unshakeable confidence that he could turn around any situation had avoided a complete rout and, for the time being, slowed if not stopped the advance of Stalin’s Red Army. This achievement made him Hitler’s most favoured fire-fighter, and the Führer sent him west to perform the same feat against the British and the Americans. Noted for his ability to instil Kampfwillen – the resolve to fight – into his men, Model called on all that resolve now to stop the Allies’ attempt to snatch control of the Netherlands. He sent troops to counter the American landings at Eindhoven and Nijmegen. But his crucial strategic decision was to concentrate his efforts on Arnhem. Whatever the cost, the bridge there must not be lost to the Allies, nor must the XXX Corps relief column be allowed to get through to it.
Model was the master of the counter-attack, which, with two crack SS panzer divisions fortuitously on his patch to recuperate and refit after Normandy, he was now mounting. So much for the briefings to the likes of Ron Brooker that they would be up against old men and second-rate troops. The reality, as he was now discovering amid the deafening sound of explosions and the scream of mortar shells, was ‘unexpectedly heavy resistance’. It was coming from one of those SS battalions that had been on a training exercise in the woods around Wolfheze when the landings began. Guessing before
everyone else that the Arnhem bridge was the target, its commander deployed his machine guns and heavy guns in the woods and on the key roads to slow the British advance almost before it had begun. With more troops and tanks soon on the way, a crucial blocking line was beginning to be established between Oosterbeek and Arnhem.
Reg Curtis ran into it as he and his company nosed their way forward. ‘Suddenly there was a loud explosion up ahead and sporadic machine-gun fire as our lead company came under hit-and-run jabs from the enemy. Mortar bombs whined and bullets slashed the undergrowth. The smell of war was in my nostrils.’ The whole battalion was forced to lie up in woods ‘for what seemed like hours, pushing on occasionally but cautiously’. The dismaying fact, as he now realized, was that the enemy were all around. He could even see their vehicles from time to time. Any advance was ‘rough, tedious, plodding along winding lanes and woods’. Hope soared when scouts reported that the main road into Arnhem was just ahead. But then, disaster. Cruising up and down the road were lines of heavily armed German half-tracks. ‘We lay doggo beneath the trees not 80 feet away and watched this display of enemy armour. We had no choice. To take on this little lot would have been slaughter for us.’ There was going to be no quick march into Arnhem. It was back to groping their way slowly through the woods.
For one group of men, the battle now developing was a particular challenge. The glider pilots had done their ferrying job and done it well. But unlike the airmen who flew the tugs or the transporters that offloaded the parachute troops, they did not have the luxury of turning round and cruising home to a beer and a sing-song in the pub. They were grounded alongside the troops they had carried, and with a new job to do. They were trained to be soldiers as well as pilots: ‘We were flying infantrymen,’ as 27-year-old Alan Kettley put it. He had been called up as a soldier back in 1940 and, in the aftermath of the Battle of Britain, applied to the RAF. He passed the tests, was told he was too old to be a pilot but could be a navigator, ‘and I thought, “Great,” and waited and waited and never heard another word. I discovered my CO didn’t want to lose me so had blocked my transfer.’ But flying was in his blood so, when in 1942 appeals were made for men to train as glider pilots, he volunteered and was accepted. ‘In the run-up to Arnhem we didn’t think how tough it was going to be or how bad it was going to get. I thought, “We’ll get there, hold the area and then XXX Corps will arrive. Four or five days, that was it.”’ So, after expertly landing his glider, he reported for general duties. ‘You’re on the ground, you’re in enemy territory, but nothing to worry about. You go from a glider pilot to a fighting soldier but that’s what we were trained to do. And as I had been in the infantry I knew about rifles, Bren guns, Sten guns, mortars and so on. Everything was going perfectly as far as I was concerned. Our orders were to defend the landing zone until the next day, then to make for the bridge with the trailer and the ammunition.’ As he settled down for the night on the edge of the landing zone, he was relaxed. ‘I had no idea how things were going to change over the coming days!’
Peter Clarke joined his group of glider pilots at their rendezvous point at a school building near the end of the field where they’d landed. Outside, some fellows were lolling under trees, just as if they were on leave and waiting for the pub to open. They were elated at their success so far, but their buzz of chatter was overlaid with some anxiety. They could hear gunfire, ‘and when you first hear gunshots and mortar you suddenly realize where you are and the danger you might be in.’ He wasn’t too concerned, still confident that the bridge would be taken in no time ‘and then we would move back to England ready for the next operation. We’d be out of there within a few days.’ He was relaxed about doing his bit as an auxiliary soldier. ‘If you had an infantry background, as I did, you were prepared for this sort of thing. I’d learned to shoot on a Lee Enfield.’ But there were – as he later came to realize – big gaps in his training. ‘I hadn’t done any actual infantry exercises and never been taught how to go on patrol. Nor had I been briefed on what to do if I was captured.’ Before becoming a pilot, he had been a medic. This, though he didn’t know it yet, was the experience that would stand him and his comrades in the greatest stead in the days ahead.
Of the glider pilots, Major Ian Toler was more wary than most, but then he had the burden of command. ‘It is all too quiet,’ he noted after landing, ‘ominously so.’ He got his men to dig in and showed the way so vigorously with his spade that his hand came up in blisters. He logged his casualties. Four men missing and two wounded. ‘They were unlucky enough to land within a few yards of an enemy machine gun, which opened up, killing some and wounding others before it was liquidated.’ That night he took the advice of an infantry officer and piled up more earth around his trench. He slept fitfully and then, when he stood his watch, heard spasmodic gunfire coming from the direction of Arnhem. Another of the men on sentry duty recalled the ‘fearsome’ whine of ‘Moaning Minnie’ mortars in the distance. But the next morning, the weather clear and sunny and after a breakfast of porridge, meat tablets and biscuits from his ration pack, the major felt better. ‘Everyone is strolling about and it is just like an exercise, only we see the padre burying one of our men who has died in the night. Perhaps this is the real thing after all.’
For some pilots, there was no ‘perhaps’ about it. Staff Sergeant Ronald Gibson, one of the last to link up with his regiment because it took so long to get the bolts out of his glider’s tail to release the contents, went from bus driver and delivery boy to infantryman with scarcely time to catch his breath. No sooner had he caught up with his column than they were heading east, down a tree-lined track and into a village. There was a fulsome welcome. Children ran to them with apples. He was especially moved by an old man in a blue cap who saluted them as they passed. ‘Suddenly there was the loud crack of a gun and a cloud of earth burst up from the pavement. We dived headlong for the bank of leaves at the foot of the trees.’5 When they got up, all those happy villagers had vanished and there was a huge shell-hole in a fence. There was no sign of the enemy. He discovered that the shell had come from a German armoured car which had fired as it crossed a road junction just ahead and then disappeared. The British soldiers took cover again.
‘I lay down beside a woodshed and peered forward through a screen of grass and nettles over a field where some dappled cows were cropping the grass. A chilly silence had followed the crack of the gun and I could hear the sound of their munching. I felt a hand touch my shoulder. I turned to see the old, blue-capped Dutchman standing with a jug of milk in one hand and a cup in the other. “You here, we free,” he said. I thought what a farcical war this was. We were crouching in a garden, waiting for the enemy to show his head, while an old man was pottering about, quite unconcerned, attending to our comfort. I had seen a similar instance in Normandy – a crowded village street, with British infantry filing along the shadow of a wall after a German sniper hiding in the churchyard, while old women hobbled over the stones with baskets under their arms on the way to the baker’s shop. The old man then brought us a bowl of plums, crawling round the corner of the shed on all fours so as to avoid revealing our position.’ This intermingling of soldiers and civilians would be repeated throughout the Arnhem campaign and be one of its most distinctive features, a triumph of trust and solidarity between two nations fighting very different types of war but against a common enemy.
Progress was not only slow but patchy. There was a minor breakthrough in one sector and a way ahead now seemed to open up alongside the Ede–Arnhem railway line that ran to the north of Oosterbeek. But as the troops trudged beside it they encountered increasing evidence of the ferocious German defence. Wolfheze station was a shelled wreck. A broken cycle lay in a ditch beside a dead German. From the heathland to their right, the perfume of heather and pine mingled with the sour smell of cordite. The crackle of Bren-gun fire sent them hurtling to the ground, searching for cover. The advance on this particular route was completely stalled, and Gibson’s squadron
was ordered to dig in. ‘On the edge of a wood, I chose a level patch between two trees, stacked my rucksack and rifle against a trunk and began to dig a foxhole in the needle-covered sand.’ As he finally put his head down for some much-needed sleep, he took one last look around him and could see in the distance that a line of gorse was blazing. ‘The noise of firing continued till dawn. The wind chilled my back and I passed a sleepless night.’
Another glider pilot, Sergeant Eric Webbley, was also at a standstill. He had left the landing zone with the jeep, the gun and the men he had just brought in and joined another line of infantry advancing towards Arnhem. A German mobile gun barred the way. ‘We crouched near our gun waiting to get a shot at it when there was suddenly a terrific explosion as Jerry fired along the road. He missed us but hit another jeep, which caught fire. With illumination from the blaze, he sent in more rounds and machine-gun fire.’6 Then the Germans put up a star shell, catching Webbley out in the open. ‘I dived into a ditch as a shell passed just yards away. I felt damned scared as Jerry swept the road with machine-gun fire.’ There was nothing else to do but keep their heads down. A decision was now made to divert around the German gun, and the infantry company left the road and headed out across fields and through hedges. It was tough going. Webbley’s jeep towed the gun but ‘we couldn’t use the lights and, the night being pitch black, I walked ahead with my left sleeve rolled up and my arm behind my back, so that our driver could see the luminous dial of my wrist watch. When the column in front stopped, I put my arm down and the jeep stopped too.’ The outflanking movement didn’t work. They halted and dug in for the night but in the morning they could see German soldiers advancing through the trees towards their position. They were as far from Arnhem as ever.
