by John Nichol
That factory, with its landmark tall chimneys, figured in the recollections of many airborne soldiers busting a gut to get close to the Arnhem bridge against newly arrived German reinforcements. Lieutenant Eric Davies had lost men getting this far but he was now ordered to launch an immediate frontal assault on the hill the factory stood on. ‘I have got about twelve men left and go straight in with them,’ he recorded in a fast-moving account that caught the breathlessness of the close-up encounters that were developing all along those access roads to Arnhem.1 ‘We charge straight up the road to the high ground, a good fast advance under sniper and machine-gun fire, and we all got to the top – no casualties. We then took some houses on the hilltop but lost men in the process. Bren-gunner shot in the face as I directed his fire. Little girl about ten years of age came out from one house and was hit, shot in thigh. Our medics attended to her, but we had to hold the mother off as she went berserk. Huns running. Now got eight or nine men left with me. Shells and mortars now descending on the factory. Decided to try and advance further. Had a close shave – bullets struck the wall 6 inches above my head, which made me very cross. Went after machine-gun nest. Getting Bren gun into position on a ridge when I am hit by enemy sniper and then by machine gun. My boys got me down and gave me morphine. Bullet through both legs and also hit in neck. A bit serious. Our lads get “my” sniper – he was up a tree. Handed over command to Sgt Poulton after blacking out once. Received an apple from one of the lads as a parting gift. Good boys, the right spirit.’ As he was strapped to a jeep to be taken for treatment, the lieutenant was cross with himself. ‘I don’t mind being shot but I do resent being out of the battle. I was just beginning to enjoy myself.’
What Reg Curtis was experiencing, however, was anything but enjoyable. In the bedlam around him he could distinguish every sound – bullets cutting the air, the stonk of mortar bombs, the fizz and clatter of hot shrapnel pinging rooftops. One piece struck his helmet and echoed in his head ‘like a pea in a drum’. And there were the human – or, rather, the inhuman – noises of battle. ‘Men were shouting curses, lobbing grenades through open doors and windows and following up with shrieks of contempt for the enemy.’ The wounded groaned, but the dead said nothing. ‘They lay motionless in the road and slumped over walls. A pair of feet protruded from the gateway of a Dutch garden.’ The battalion, Curtis realized, was taking fire from every direction and being cut to ribbons.
To his right was the factory, and he raced over open ground for the cover of its walls, ‘catapulting forward like an Olympic runner, zig-zagging for twenty paces, then hitting the ground and rolling sideways to dodge those Jerry snipers’. They were in windows and behind chimney pots. Some had strapped themselves to the branches of trees. He found a position between the factory and the river and began to snipe back at the snipers. Inside the building, a battle to the death was under way. ‘Men were scrapping like gangsters, with grenades, Stens, Colts and knives.’ From the far side of the Rhine, German artillery shells were crashing in.
Curtis had his sights lined up on a German in the garden of a terraced house and was about to pull the trigger when he felt a sharp pain and an explosion beneath him. ‘The lower part of my right leg was in a most unusual position. Blood was oozing out fast. I was placed on a stretcher and carried to a wooden shed a few yards away, where medics cut the boot from the foot of my shattered leg. It looked awful.’ A veteran of North Africa, he’d been carrying a field dressing in his blouse for years and in many different parts of the world and never had to use it. He never thought he’d be a casualty. ‘Now I lay there and tore it open.’ Amid the pandemonium and the noise, a medic kept a steady hand as he drove a morphine injection into the wounded Curtis. ‘Then, while he hunted round for a makeshift splint, a young Dutch girl appeared from nowhere and offered me some water. I was feeling cold and clammy, and her help was of great comfort.’
On a stretcher, Curtis was carried away from the battlefront and hidden behind a garden wall. The scene he left was deteriorating all the time. ‘Everyone was scattered. There were dead paras in the road, on the pavement, in gardens. Snipers were busy trying to winkle out those still alive.’ But the paras were far from beaten. When they saw muzzle flashes from an upper window 20 yards down the road, four of them pressed themselves into a wall as they worked their way stealthily towards where the firing was coming from. They lobbed grenades inside and followed up by charging the door and spraying Sten-gun fire up through the floorboards. ‘A Schmeisser automatic fell from the top window, followed by an SS man.’
For Curtis, too, the fighting was over. He was moved to a barn doubling up as an aid post and then, strapped to the bonnet of a jeep, driven to the makeshift field hospital set up in the Tafelberg Hotel at Oosterbeek. As he was carried into the foyer, he saw the mayhem of many wounded comrades and heard the clatter of gunfire from just outside. Clearly, such was the scope of the battle, there were no safe havens in and around Arnhem. ‘Ah well,’ he told himself, ‘we will have to make the best of it.’ It was fast becoming the brave and stoical motto of the entire enterprise.2
The greater part of the British assault on Arnhem may well have been stopped in its tracks short of its target, but its fighting presence bought time for those on the bridge – time perhaps for XXX Corps to get through. Knowing this, the German military command was desperate to destroy Frost’s beleaguered force on the bridge’s northern approach as quickly as possible and ordered it to be swept away like a nest of irritating ants. But while other ants were swarming around at the edges, the Germans could not focus their military superiority on the siege at the bridge. They had to spread their forces. What spurred on the likes of Fred Moore as they continued their advance into Arnhem was the message filtering through that Frost’s paras had indeed reached their objective. ‘But we faced a bloody battle through a built-up area against defended positions.’ Progress was so slow that his company was ordered to occupy some houses and try to get some rest. As they settled down they were aware that the Germans were camped in nearby houses too, perhaps even next door. ‘We made as little noise as possible,’ and Moore had angrily to silence the snores of one of his men to avoid alerting the enemy.
They made an early start next morning, hoping to sneak the remaining 2 miles to the bridge under cover of darkness. They kept to one side of the road, ducking low and creeping along at the back of buildings. They made progress – until the dawn revealed that they were fully exposed to a German artillery position on the other side of the river. ‘They raked us with a concentrated barrage. We had nowhere to hide.’ Moore’s three-man machine-gun crew was sent out into the open to try to pin down the German gunners, a near-suicidal position. He could only watch as one of his crew slumped sideways, dead. ‘I pushed his body aside and moved into his position. I hoped that he had been hit by an indiscriminate shot rather than a targeted one. A shout from the rear signalled us to pull out and, stopping only to collect the identity disc from our dead comrade, we beat a hasty retreat. We were but one mile from the bridge!’
This was their limit. Any further advance along this line was blocked by armour and there was no alternative but to fall back. As he withdrew, just up the road, Moore came across Andy Milbourne being attended to by a medic. ‘He had been manning a machine gun to cover our retreat and had taken a direct hit. His hands were shattered and his face covered in blood.’ Milbourne’s own recollection was of being in a garden and firing into a wood where the enemy were massing. ‘Shells and mortars kept bursting among us. It seemed as if a thousand devils were raging in our midst. Death reared its ugly head on all sides. German SS infantry were trying to rush us.’ He heard himself shouting, ‘Let the bastards have it,’ and there was ‘a flash … then stars’. When he came to, his hands felt strange – ‘no pain but far away’. He asked where the two men who’d been at his side were. They were dead. ‘Now, old son,’ a voice said, ‘let’s get these bandages. Just relax while I give you a jab of morphine. Easy does it.’ The next voi
ce he heard was a long time later, and it was German. Milbourne’s Arnhem experience would leave him with just one eye and no arms.
That morning, Sergeant Bob Quayle also got as far as he was going to get. The day before had been hell, and he had been caught in the same ‘scary’ open ground near the factory as Reg Curtis. He and his unit had tried to find another route but everywhere was carnage. At a road junction he came upon para jeeps and trailers parked up but with their drivers and passengers dead, hanging out of the doors at grotesque angles. ‘I decided it was too dangerous to advance along the street, so took the lads through back gardens and on to a track by the river bank. We did well for some time but came under heavy machine-gun fire again. We had to get into the river for cover, and it was very cold.’3 They spent the night in a house near Arnhem’s St Elizabeth Hospital, down by the river on the town’s western edge, and he got his men up early next day for what he hoped would be the last leg to the bridge. He was leading them down an alley back to the river when he heard a noise. A lieutenant with five riflemen emerged out of the mist and asked him where he was going. ‘To the bridge, where else?’ he replied. He was put straight. ‘No, you’re not.’ Things had moved on, orders changed, realities had to be accepted. ‘We’ve been sent,’ the lieutenant continued, ‘to contact as many men as possible and tell them to forget going forward to the bridge. Take up defensive positions, Sergeant, and hold out as long as you can.’
Forget the bridge – it was official. What had been the primary objective of the mission had just been cancelled, for his unit at least. Clearly, things were not going well and they were being forced to fall back. Quayle moved his men into a semi-detached house and waited. ‘Very soon the rattle of tanks came up the road and we opened fire, with little effect.’ He had thought he and his men were isolated and on their own but was reassured at seeing firing coming from other houses nearby. ‘We were not alone, then.’ But any semblance of a battle-plan seemed to be disintegrating. Fred Moore could not help noticing the total confusion in the para ranks. ‘No one seemed to be in command as we retraced our steps, back towards our starting point,’ he recalled. ‘The battalion had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist as a defined unit. We were now a mixed group from different units and battalions with no clear destination or purpose.’ Some sense of order had to be restored or this could all too easily turn into an ignominious rout.
That it didn’t was because the surviving officers rallied and took hold of the situation. As they urgently conferred on what to do next, Moore nosed round a nearby building and came across a large kitchen with a stove, a frying pan and a supply of eggs. It was too good an opportunity to miss, and he set to work. The eggs were sizzling in the pan, the yolks firming and the whites turning nicely white, his mouth watering … and suddenly he had to abandon the feast. There were new orders. German tanks had been sighted. The troops were to evacuate the area immediately and regroup at Oosterbeek, where a defensive perimeter was to be set up. Moore was ordered to stay behind with his machine gun for a quarter of an hour to cover the rear of the retreating column. His appetite was gone. ‘I was not altogether thrilled at seeing the last of the column disappear around the bend in the road, leaving us behind. We scanned the approaches to our position and listened for any sound of armour coming my way. I mentally counted each interminably long passing second until the fifteen minutes were up and we set off to catch up with the main body.’
When he reached the column, it was under attack. A low-flying Messerschmitt roared over and scared everyone half to death, but the real danger was from clanking German tanks that could be heard approaching over a hill in front. Was their escape route about to be cut off? An anti-tank crew was deployed forward and as the first panzer – ‘a huge monster’ – came over the crest, they fired and hit it head on. It ground to a halt across the road and there was a cheer from the British ranks. But a second tank followed. This one fired and hit the British anti-tank crew, killing them both, but not before they had managed to unleash a last shell. It struck home, and the second tank burst into flames. The way to Oosterbeek was unblocked. ‘We rounded a bend in the road to find a number of houses on each side – a defensible position at last. We occupied the houses and dug slit trenches in the gardens at strategic points.’ The bridge at Arnhem was forgotten, an irrelevance now. Here in Oosterbeek, a fresh battle, every bit as fierce and deadly, was about to begin.
The Dutch were distraught. Anje van Maanen had been exultant at the arrival of the British soldiers and, when a stranger among the jubilant crowd celebrating on the main street of Oosterbeek had suggested that the Germans might well be coming back, she had dismissed him as drunk or mad. Now she wasn’t so sure. She and her brother Paul watched from their attic window as khaki-clad airborne soldiers who earlier had been parading openly through the town began showing signs of nervousness. They were hugging the cover of buildings, avoiding crossing the road: ‘All very strange.’ Four Tommies, as she called them, had taken up residence in what had been a German slit trench, and she took them some tea. Two were washing and shaving and another was pulling on his pipe. They seemed relaxed enough. ‘Is Monty coming soon?’ she asked eagerly, and they replied, ‘Within the hour. We’ve just heard it on the radio.’ They told her that the Airborne had captured the bridge at Arnhem and were now simply waiting for XXX Corps, the spearhead of the British Second Army, to relieve them. She wasn’t totally convinced. ‘We can hear guns in the distance. Clearly, the fighting around the bridge is still going on.’
As if to confirm this, she saw wounded soldiers being driven into her street and taken to the Tafelberg Hotel, where she knew her father was running a field hospital to help the British. Earlier she had shuddered and screamed at the sight of German corpses in the street, ‘their dead eyes staring at me’, and now the carnage was continuing. ‘I don’t dare to look at the jeeps passing our house carrying the wounded. Suddenly, we hear a whistling noise above our heads. Bullets! We are being fired on and we are scared. It must be a German sniper firing from a tree or a rooftop. We hide.’ Her father came home with tales of treating the wounded and urged her to visit one young soldier, whose birthday it was. ‘I promise I’ll go but I’m embarrassed, and I never do, which is sad because he died.’ That night, as evening fell, so did the optimism of the day. ‘There is more shooting now and we have a queer feeling that things are not going as well as we hoped. The great army is not here yet.’ The family stared into the distance from the rooftop and could make out lights on the road from Nijmegen to Arnhem. ‘We think that must be Monty. But we are also a little bit afraid. Outside, the shooting is louder and getting nearer.’
In the morning, the news was no better and, if anything, worse. Apparently, the Dutch resistance groups had been told to take off their orange armbands. ‘The situation is still too dangerous for them to come out in the open. Better to wait until all is safe. We are terribly disappointed. This must mean that things are not going well with the liberation. Are we going to have the Germans back again? Oh no.’ Anje’s anxiety was not allayed when she spotted coming down the street not Germans but ‘very strange figures with trolleys, bags and suitcases. They look like beggars. Who are these people?’ She went to the front door and was told they were refugees fleeing from Arnhem. ‘I think to myself, how ridiculous. They must be out of their minds. But more and more appear – young couples, old tired women and men. And they are all carrying things or pushing prams. There are weeping kids too.’ She was gratified to see the Tommies climb out of their trench to help – ‘they are such gentlemen.’ The stream, though, seemed endless, as now were the jeeps passing on their way to the Tafelberg with wounded lashed in pairs across their bonnets.
The refugee situation hit home when family friends, the Aalbers, arrived in the street with their bags and asked if they could stay. Their house was on the outskirts of Oosterbeek, but there had been fighting and they had taken fright and left. ‘They look terrible, exhausted and almost mad with fear. Over tea at th
e table, they tell us how they had a little British tank in their garden which was firing at Germans on the other side of the railway track. The Germans fired back and set their house ablaze and they had to flee through a rain of bullets, climbing over the gate and creeping through gardens.’ All this was a shock for Anje, the more so when she was sent to her room to pack in case she had to flee too. ‘I thought we were free, that the war was over. The future had looked so perfect. I just couldn’t understand it. I was devastated.’ Upstairs, she crammed a cardigan, new black shoes, socks, stockings, underwear and a toothbrush into a small bag. ‘I also put in my little box with a few jewels in, but Aunt Anke takes them out and says it’s better to put them in the safe.’
At her house in Oosterbeek, Marie-Anne had the dismaying experience of seeing large numbers of British soldiers heading her way from the direction of Arnhem. ‘We cannot be certain what they are doing, but we are afraid they are retreating.’ Two asked to come in and went upstairs to set up a look-out post. ‘They remain in Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom. When they come down again, we ask them if they want to wash. They like that, as they are very dirty. We fry some potatoes for them, with apple sauce. They tell us their names are Len and Gerald. Len is thirty and married with two boys. Gerald is twenty-one, married but has no children. Neither of them has had any sleep for three nights.’ The two soldiers passed the word, and soon others came by to refresh themselves. ‘They are very grateful for the opportunity. One of them gives me a dark red scarf. They are all very nice boys.’
At the van Maanens’, the cellar was prepared for the night with mattresses on the floor and a cushion under the window for the dog. ‘We fill the bath, buckets and tins with water. Anything combustible is taken out to the garage.’ Suitcases were stowed under the stairs, along with brother Paul’s accordion, in case a quick getaway was needed. Anje headed outside with more tea for the soldiers in their slit trench. ‘When is Monty coming?’ she asked for the umpteenth time. ‘In a quarter of an hour,’ they say. ‘We stop and strain our ears and imagine we can hear the tanks in the distance, but it is not true and the waiting goes on. I help a soldier with a sprained ankle to walk to the hospital. He has come from Arnhem on this foot and collapsed in front of our house. More and more people are arriving from there. They say corpses are lying everywhere and there is fighting all over the place. The bridge is no-man’s land. It must be like hell.’
