by John Nichol
At the bridge, Frost, desperate not only to report his position but also to establish what was going on, sent out a four-man patrol to try to make contact with the other columns supposedly on their way from the drop zone. Brooker, one of the four, had difficulty just getting out on to the street, because the yard was in the firing line of German snipers perched high on a nearby church. Once outside, they ducked through the darkening streets until they came to a square. Peering round a corner, they could see German infantry assembling and digging in. Of their own reinforcements, there was not a glimmer. Unable to go any further, the patrol made its way back to HQ, ‘having achieved nothing’. Other forays proved equally unproductive. Frost sent out a thirty-man platoon to forage for a boat, cross the Rhine and come up on the bridge from the other side. ‘We set off along the bank but couldn’t find a boat,’ its leader, Lieutenant Pat Barnett, recalled.4 After a gun battle with the enemy, they withdrew. More attempts to rush the bridge and seize a foothold on the other bank were repulsed and incurred heavy casualties. No one, it was rapidly becoming clear, was going anywhere. As a day of enterprise, courage and shifting fortunes came to an end, the paras at the bridge dug in while the Germans called for reinforcements to winkle them out. A stalemate had been reached, for now.
Sims took up position on a large, grassed traffic island in the middle of a five-way road junction between the road ramp and the river. He set about digging mortar pits and slit trenches in the sandy soil. This would be the first line of defence for the houses and warehouses behind, most now occupied by various British platoons and turned into strongholds. He moaned that it was tiring work, and did they really have to go so deep? His mate, digging alongside, told him to get on with it: ‘Two or three hours from now and it won’t seem half deep enough.’ All around, parachutists were making similar burrows for themselves in the earth, like a colony of sexton beetles, Sims thought. Finally, he settled into his hole, took out some army fruitcake from his pack and munched on it. It was dry but good and very welcome. ‘Up on the bridge itself, vehicles were still burning. One was an ammunition lorry and, every now and again, it shuddered as the fire reached another box of bullets or shells and they exploded in a fantastic firework display.’ Sims started to doze off. ‘It was like drifting into sleep after a particularly good Bonfire Night when the last squibs are being thrown on a dying fire.’
There was no sleep for Ted Mordecai, however. In the house his company occupied, he knocked the glass out of a window on the top floor and took up a position a yard or so back behind a makeshift barricade, facing the bridge. ‘Outside, the fires had really taken hold and lit up the whole area.’ He worked out his line of fire and pulled the scrim netting from his helmet down over his face so he couldn’t be seen. As the night wore on and the flames and the firing around the bridge died down, he saw a figure outside approach the house and demand to know who was inside. The most extraordinary thing about him was that he was waving a rolled umbrella. It was, it turned out, the brave Major Digby Tatham-Warter, whose stiff-upper-lip calmness under fire would be one of the triumphant images of the whole Arnhem experience. He was casing the area, finding out who was in which building, a death-defying business, since some housed Germans. He wanted six volunteers to come outside and cover him as he reconnoitred a particular building down the road. Mordecai went with him, Sten gun sweeping the windows and doors, as the major stood brazenly in the open and loudly demanded to know who was inside. ‘Personally, I thought it was stupid, because if Jerry had been in the house we would have been in for a rough time out there in the open. Fortunately for us, the reply came back that it was occupied by some of our gunners and sappers. This evidently satisfied the major and he strolled off into the darkness, still directing operations with his brolly.’ But the commotion had stirred up the enemy and a machine gun opened up on Mordecai as he and the others dashed back to their house. ‘Having regained our breath, we resumed positions at the windows until daybreak.’
One of the last to get through to the bridge was Major Eric Mackay of the Royal Engineers. He and his men had a tough time getting there. As they trudged through central Arnhem dragging trolleys loaded with explosives, ‘all around us there seemed to be surreptitious movements in the dark. We could hear the enemy moving along parallel streets.’5 They were ambushed by a German patrol and a ‘sharp scrap’ ensued. Then they had to brave furious crossfire from either side of a city square and cross 40 yards of open ground, still with their trolleys. Once at the bridge, Mackay was directed to some buildings on the far side of the road ramp and ordered to fortify and hold them. One was a school, the other a house. Ten minutes after they took possession they were attacked from a building just 15 yards away, which turned out to be the headquarters of a company of German soldiers. ‘The enemy crept through the bushes and right up to us before we were aware of them. They threw grenades through the window and got a foothold in the basement. Determined hand-to-hand fighting with fists, boots, rifle-butts and bayonets dislodged them. They brought up a machine gun and poked it through a window, spraying everyone in the room. I was beside the window, shot the gunman and turned the gun on the mob outside.’
More grenades were lobbed in. ‘Nearly half the force in the house was already wounded and it was apparent that if we stayed any longer we should all become casualties.’ They would have to retreat to the school, and to do that meant clearing the enemy out of the garden first. Mackay, his sergeant and six men went out and ‘mixed it’ in the bushes. The enemy, he recalled, had no stomach for cold steel and retired. ‘We pursued them to their building with grenades and gave them a taste of their own medicine. We then kept up hot fire as my corporal got the wounded over a high wall and into the school, where we rejoined the rest of the force.’ From this eyeball-to-eyeball duel – the first of many in the days ahead – he had seven wounded men, two of them seriously, and he himself had minor shrapnel wounds and a cut in his head where a bullet had gone through his helmet – ‘more messy than painful’, as he put it. With his fifty men, six Bren guns and lots of ammunition and grenades, he prepared for a siege. ‘We had no anti-tank weapons, very little food, only the water in our water bottles and no medical supplies except morphine and field dressings.’ Before dawn, they repelled two attacks – and that was only the start.
The citizens of Arnhem, their peaceful town suddenly turned into a battlefield, were understandably in turmoil, unclear about what was happening in the streets not far from their homes. Were they about to be free, or weren’t they? Their emotions were taut, like violin strings that could either deliver the sweetest of music or snap apart. They didn’t know what to think or who to believe. A jubilant Heleen Kernkamp had watched as panicking German soldiers quit a requisitioned house just across the street from where she was staying. ‘In a tearing hurry, they loaded tables, desks, telephones and food into jeeps and drove away.’ The departure of black-uniformed SS troops, ‘who had been responsible for an incalculable amount of grief and misery’, brought the greatest relief and satisfaction. But, as a counterpoint to all this, there was the shelling and the bombing to contend with, getting nearer and nearer all the time, and the terrifying uncertainty about what was happening. The Klompe household where she was staying was filling up as neighbours and friends crowded in, seeking shelter together. The electricity and gas were cut off but the telephone kept ringing. ‘All the piecemeal fragments of news we heard only made us more and more excited and nervous. Nobody knew exactly what was going on except that, judging by the noise, there was heavy fighting. We could not leave or go outside, as we could hear bullets hitting trees, walls and streets.’
They wanted desperately to believe the friend who phoned from Oosterbeek to sing the first verse of the Wilhelmus and announce the liberation there. If the people were free in Oosterbeek, then could Arnhem’s deliverance be far behind? ‘We were all very deeply moved. This was tangible, it was really happening and we became greatly excited.’ Though it was late and the day had been exhausting, no o
ne wanted to go to bed. ‘The constant shelling made us nervous, and we were much too tense and strung up. We all sat together in a big circle round a candle and talked over the events of the day. Suddenly a loud banging on the front door gave us a terrible fright.’
Years of instinct and discipline kicked in, and they all dashed upstairs to hide two young men in the house who were on the run. In their haste, they forgot one of the many cardinal rules of concealment – they failed to remove the young men’s chairs from the circle, and any SS or Gestapo officer entering on a raid would almost certainly have spotted that there were more seats than people and drawn the obvious, calamitous conclusion. As it was, the knock at the door was a false alarm, and they all joined the two men in the attic to stare out over the rooftops of Arnhem. It was ‘a truly fantastic’ sight, with enormous fires from buildings set alight by the Germans or by the bombing burning all over the town. ‘A stiff breeze was blowing sparks along our windows and the whole neighbourhood was lit up by a ghostly reddish glow, through which we could pick out people in the street. One group was sneaking from house to house and peering through windows. We thought that, in spite of everything that was going on, it must be the Germans still hunting out men in hiding. But we were afraid and none of us dared venture outside to check.’ The knock on the door, it transpired, was from someone in the town trying without success to get help for a casualty from the bombing, but the Klompes weren’t alone in being too scared to open up. The atmosphere had switched from hope to apprehension. ‘The fact that we were without light and power for the very first time produced in all of us a sensation of hopelessness. I tried to comfort one woman who was beside herself with terror, but the feeling of being trapped with no means of escape will remain with me for ever. It was one of the most terrible and nerve-wracking experiences of my life.’
Pieter Huisman was another of Arnhem’s worried citizens sleeping uneasily in his bed that night, wondering what tomorrow would bring. The family had busied themselves around the house, packing bags in case they suddenly had to flee the city, but now they were down in the cellar again, his small sons on mattresses and he and his wife stretched out in armchairs. ‘There is a lot of firing. The boys are very afraid.’ A phone call from his nephew in Oosterbeek told him that, there, the people had been liberated and so, he was reassured, would he be, very soon. ‘But when I looked out of the window all I could see was Germans manning machine guns.’ Where were the British? Rumour had them on the bridge, at police headquarters, in the heart of the city, at the St Elizabeth Hospital. But then counter-rumour said the Germans were hitting back and the British were retreating. There in the candle-lit cellar with his frightened family, he did not did not know what to believe. ‘Which is true?’ he asked himself. It was a very good question and one to which there was no simple answer. All that Heleen Kernkamp could discern from the noise of machine guns and rifles and bullets slamming into walls was that ‘first one side and then the other was advancing, only to be driven back.’ It was a fair summary of the developing military situation.
As dawn broke on a misty Monday morning and the second day of the Arnhem operation began, a fog swirled over the waters of the Rhine. Those few men of 1st Airborne who had managed to get some sleep in their various buildings and dug-outs around the Arnhem bridge and road ramp were roused by an encouraging sound. Ron Brooker heard the rattle of tank tracks and the revving of engines. Armour was on its way. It had to be XXX Corps! ‘Everybody cheered. Our boys were here. We felt excited and relieved.’ Looking back from a distance of sixty-five years, he could see that such optimism was absurd. ‘Logically, it couldn’t be them. We’d been in Arnhem only a few hours and there was no way they could have got here that quickly. But it’s strange how the mind works. We told each other, “Yeah, it’s over, they’re here.” Of course, they weren’t.’ What was heading their way across from the southern end of the bridge was, they realized by the black crosses painted on the sides, a German column of half-tracks and armoured cars. The enemy was counter-attacking, and in force, attempting to win back the northern end of the bridge they had lost the night before. Everyone snapped into action. As Leo Hall put it, ‘it was as if both sides had been waiting for the referee’s dawn whistle in order for play to begin seriously.’ For the airborne soldiers, their heroic battle to hang on to the Arnhem bridge was about to begin.
The German armour came on, tanks, lorries and open-topped Opel troop carriers in line astern, 10 yards apart. They were hit by heavy and accurate fire from the paras’ positions. There was an explosion as a 6-pounder anti-tank gun fired from just below the ramp and caught one of the cars, which slewed to a halt, blocking the bridge. Ted Mordecai remembered how the others were forced to pull up and presented ‘a perfect target for all of us. Everyone in range immediately opened fire and any German soldiers who tried to cut and run were knocked over.’ But not all. When a shell halted one half-track, a German leapt from the back and, though half a dozen British rifles fixed on him, he danced out of trouble. Brooker was back up on a chair and leaning out of the dormer window to get in a shot at him when a burst of German machine-gun fire shattered the glass. A shard hurtled down through his beret and sliced a large flap of skin from his head. A glass fragment entered his right eye. ‘It was the first time I’d been wounded and I was shocked.’ To this day, he carries scars from the thirty-seven stitches needed to patch him up. Staggering down to the basement for treatment, he realized his luck as he caught sight of the bodies of the dead, a dozen or so, piled up in a shed outside. The paras might be holding off the German attackers, but at a growing cost. He took his place among the wounded, sitting on the floor of a long passage. ‘The attitude of these men, many quite badly wounded, was truly amazing. They could still manage a laugh and give moral support to each other. The main topic of conversation was “Any news of XXX Corps?”’
In a lull in the fighting, Mordecai went to the kitchen of the house he and his troop were occupying and boiled up some water and Oxo cubes. Breakfast! It was the first hot drink any of them had had for twenty-four hours. ‘We all felt better after this and more alert.’ He also tried to snatch some sleep, but his mind was racing and he couldn’t, despite the luxury of a feather bed in an upstairs room. What relaxation he was getting was then blown apart by a huge explosion. ‘A large cloud of smoke and dust came gushing through the bedroom door.’ Out on the landing he saw that a shell had hit the house and there was a gaping hole where the back wall and roof had been. ‘The worst of it was that three Signals chaps had gone into a small back bedroom to sleep and the one who’d got the bed rather than the floor was now lying under a pile of rubble.’ The other two were just stunned, but he was dead, such was the luck of the draw.
Elsewhere on the battlefield, James Sims had left his slit trench in the traffic island by the bridge and climbed through a window into a nearby building – dubbed the White House, though its façade was really more of a light grey – to set up an observation post from which to direct mortar attacks. The house was already under fire, ominously not from the Germans on the other side of the river but from the west. This was the direction from which reinforcements from the drop zone should be arriving, but the shelling indicated that the Germans must still be holding that area and keeping those reinforcements at bay. What if they never got here? What if they couldn’t push aside the German forces in their way? He drew the obvious and chilling conclusion ‘that we were now in real danger of being completely cut off from the remainder of the 1st Airborne Division’.
He reached a large upstairs room overlooking his traffic island and was forced to dive to the floor as bullets ricocheted around him. ‘Snipers,’ a badly wounded officer, his jaw set firm but his eyes betraying the pain he was in, informed him. ‘You’ll find it safer to crawl on your belly.’ Up another flight of stairs, and Sims was in the attic, from which he saw German infantry in lorries advancing along a road from the river towards the White House. Evidently, they were unaware that houses they were passing
were filled with paratroopers, whose bullets now ripped through them, killing virtually all of them. Sims watched with horrified fascination as one terribly wounded German soldier, shot through both legs, pulled himself hand over hand towards his own lines. ‘He was the only creature moving among a carpet of the dead.’ With superhuman effort, he managed to drag himself across the road and up the grassy incline leading to the bridge road. He was just about to heave himself over a parapet to safety ‘when a rifle barked out next to me and he fell back, shot through the head. To me it was little short of murder but to my companion, one of our best snipers, the German was a legitimate target. When I protested he looked at me as though I was simple.’
If the compassionate Sims felt sorry for his enemy, it was not for long. Shortly afterwards, a white civilian ambulance came hurtling down the same road and a British Bren-gunner opened up on it until he was ordered to stop. ‘Can’t you see the red cross, you bloody fool?’ an angry officer demanded. Just then, the doors of the ambulance opened and several SS troopers rushed out, firing from the hip. Most were cut down before reaching the White House but ‘one made it to the front door before collapsing on the steps, riddled with bullets. The road outside was covered with dead and dying Germans. Our medics went out to clear the dead away and treat the wounded.’
For now, frontal assaults ceased, but the barrage of shells continued. From on high, Sims looked down on his comrades in the slit trenches outside. ‘Shrapnel was pattering down like a thunderstorm of death but, by some miracle, not one of them was hit.’ On the contrary, they were the ones doing the damage, after Sims and his officer trained their binoculars on lorries of German reinforcements arriving at the other end of the bridge and assessed the range and elevation to pass down to the men in the mortar pit. The walkie-talkie wasn’t working so Sims leaned out of the window to shout the instructions, withdrawing his head just before the snipers spotted him. The mortar barrage took out two trucks, sending the troops on them scuttling away. ‘It must have come as a terrific shock for them to be hit by such devastating fire from the other side of the river.’
