by John Nichol
His assessment was correct. When the disastrous uprising began in Warsaw at the beginning of August 1944, the brigade had no choice but to sit on its hands in England, unable to save its brave countrymen and women from systematic destruction by the SS. They had sat on their hands, too, for the Normandy landings two months before and, like the other airborne brigades, spent much of that summer winding up for missions that were then cancelled at the last minute. Now they sat in enforced idleness again while, a thousand miles away, Warsaw burned, and they could do nothing about it. Emotions ran high as call after call came from the partisans for international help, particularly from their own countrymen in exile. ‘Many of us wanted to go,’ said Szmid, ‘even though it might well be a suicide mission and we would be completely wiped out. But we were not allowed.’ Allied assistance was confined to dropping weapons and supplies. Then, while Warsaw was being brutally re-taken district by district by the Waffen SS, its buildings wrecked and its people put to the sword, along came the Arnhem mission to distract the Polish paras from the rape of their capital city. It would be the brigade’s baptism, their first time into action. ‘Some of us were especially keen to go, to take revenge on the Germans,’ he recalled.
Their role, however, was never planned to be heroic or even central to the mission. They would be a back-up force primarily, going in as the third and last wave when, if the Market Garden timetable was met, the fighting might well be over and the job virtually done. They were to drop just a mile directly south of the bridge at Arnhem and link up with the British paras of the 1st Airborne on the north bank, who hopefully by then would already have captured it. In an ideal world, at precisely that moment, the advance troops and tanks of the Second Army streaming along the corridor from the Belgian border would arrive, sweep over the Rhine without stopping and plough on into Germany, leaving the Poles the pedestrian job of digging into defensive positions. That was the theory. Szmid’s Polish commanders were doubtful that it would be that simple, and the outspoken ‘Pop’ Sosabowski annoyed the British by expressing his misgivings. ‘What will the Germans be doing while all this is going on?’ he asked, not bothering to conceal his sarcasm.
Such thoughts were anathema to those high-ranking strategists convinced that Market Garden would bring a quick end to the war, and his opinions were ignored as negative and defeatist. ‘My dear Sosabowski,’ said a patronizing Major-General ‘Boy’ Browning, the Airborne Corps commander, ‘the Red Devils and the gallant Poles can do anything.’ And when he queried whether the bridge would really have been captured by the time the Poles got there, he was told to stop worrying. ‘We’ll be waiting for you with buses and cups of tea,’ a dismissive British staff officer suggested. Unconvinced, Sosabowski briefed his own men to expect hard and bitter fighting, not the predicted picnic.
When the operation began on Sunday 17 September, Szmid stood on the ground at his camp in Lincolnshire and watched in wonder as the first wave of planes passed overhead on their way to Arnhem. He did the same the next day for the second lift. He considered what was to come. ‘How will I do when it’s our turn? Will I be up to the job? What if the Germans are waiting for us? Will I come back? Will I die?’ He would know soon – though not as soon as he imagined. They were due to go on day three, take-off at 10 a.m. from RAF Spanhoe in Northamptonshire. The weather was rotten – fog at ground level and thick cloud up to 10,000 feet, extending out over the North Sea. Three times they climbed on and off the Dakotas, until, by late afternoon it was apparent they weren’t going anywhere except back to barracks. The gliders carrying the brigade’s heavy equipment and guns had managed to get away, however, from airfields in the south5 where the visibility was better. They landed in a clearing on the north side of the Lower Rhine, dropping into the middle of a pitched battle and taking heavy casualties.
Back in England, the Polish paras passed a second day of shredded nerves and frustration as the fog refused to lift. This time they got as far as taxiing down the runway before the take-off was aborted. ‘Some of our men wanted to attack the American pilots we were so keyed up. The tension got to one of my comrades, who put his gun to his head, pulled the trigger and blew his head off. Back at the barracks, another man went crazy and crawled under a bed, growling like an animal. He was taken away in an ambulance.’ Szmid stayed calm but got through his entire allowance of five hundred cigarettes. There was a technical safety problem, too, to worry about – the uncertain state of their parachutes. ‘They were supposed to be packed for a maximum of two days, and we had just gone past that limit.’ For Sosabowski, however, more problems were piling up than parachutes past their best. A complete change of plan was dropped on him.
Patchy information was beginning to get through to Second Army command headquarters on the unreliable radio link with the front line. The news from the hemmed-in forces at Arnhem and Oosterbeek was bad. The bridge had not been taken and the 2 Para force there was in desperate straits. The Poles’ designated drop zone just south of the bridge was firmly in German hands, and they would be cut to ribbons if they dropped there. From his beleaguered headquarters in Oosterbeek, Urquhart, the 1st Airborne commander, desperate for reinforcements, proposed a new DZ for the Poles – 4 miles to the west of the original one, in fields outside the village of Driel, on the opposite side of the Rhine from Oosterbeek. From there they must hike to the river, cross it on a chain ferry that had hopefully been secured by the British and then link up with the 1st Airborne in Oosterbeek. Sosabowski had, it seemed, been correct in his misgivings, though he got no thanks for his perspicacity. Now he and his brigade staff officers had to jettison all their carefully prepared plans and improvise a landing in terrain they knew virtually nothing about to join a battle on which they had been given virtually no information. It was a tall order, and one which the volatile Sosabowski got very close to refusing on the grounds that he was sending his men to their deaths for no good reason.
In the end, the Poles went into action. The general swallowed his doubts and his anger, and the brigade finally got into the air on the afternoon of their third day on standby and the fifth day of the whole operation – Thursday 21 September. Only then, as they headed to Holland, were the troops told that their drop zone had changed and their mission altered. The new instructions worried Szmid. ‘This meant we were parachuting on to a place we didn’t know anything about. In the back of the Dakota, no one talked, apart from a few muttered prayers. We sat staring straight ahead, not looking at each other. We were jumping into the unknown.’ If they got there, that was, because suddenly they were under attack from German fighter planes. The whole element of surprise – the paratrooper’s secret weapon – had long gone by the board, and the Luftwaffe was waiting. Szmid looked out to see large bullet holes in the wing. Just then, the green light came on and the troops surged down the fuselage and through the door as fast as they could, dropping free of the enemy fighter planes above but down into the line of fire from German troops on the ground. Below was the paratrooper’s worst nightmare – a ‘hot’ landing zone. They came down into soft farm fields divided by ditches and raked by Spandau heavy machine guns from a nearby railway embankment. ‘Fountains of dirt were rising around me as I was fired on. I picked myself up and ran for cover.’
The Poles had arrived. Through no fault of their own, they were two days late and their assignment had changed at the last minute, so they were unprepared. But, worst of all, they were, it now turned out, also massively under strength. The take-off from England had been touch and go at best, the weather still uncertain and the light beginning to fade. A third of the 114 planes had turned back after a confusion over messages from base. As the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade re-grouped on the ground in enemy-occupied country, whipped into shape by tongue-lashings from their commander, its fighting strength was down to 950 men. Sosabowski could see the deficiency in numbers but, unable to communicate with headquarters, had no idea what had happened to the rest. The depleted force, a third down, headed towards the river und
er a storm of shells from enemy artillery and mortar positions on high ground. ‘We moved through orchards, pasturelands, climbing over fences, jumping ditches, and other obstacles,’ Szmid said. ‘I had to throw myself to the ground on several occasions when I heard shells coming towards me.’ They were grateful for the armoured vests they had opted to wear under their smocks – unlike the British paras, who rejected them for being heavy and slowing them down. One man had three dents in his, each one a bullet that could have been fatal.
They climbed the last earth embankment and were at the water’s edge, staring across the Lower Rhine at the battlefield on the other side they were expected to join. In the distance to the east, black smoke was rising from the centre of pulverized Arnhem, but closer, directly opposite and less than a mile away, was the awesome sight of Oosterbeek, wreathed in orange flames and the white flashes of high-explosive shells. But how were they to get across the fast-flowing river? There was no sign of the British soldiers they had been told would be there to guide them. Thinking they might be waiting on the other side, a Polish officer fired a flare into the air as a signal. The response was a stream of German tracer bullets. There was no ferry boat either. The Dutch ferryman had scuttled it to stop it falling into German hands.
The Poles were not to know that, on the other side, belated efforts were being made to keep this back door into Oosterbeek open. The hard-pressed Urquhart had made an error in his deployment of troops around the perimeter and not paid enough attention to its river end. When patrols were eventually sent down into the open meadows to secure the ferry, they found that the Germans controlled most of the river bank. They were dug in close to the ferry dock and regularly sweeping it with bullets. Not only was the ferry gone, but the dock itself had been reduced to a mass of splintered wood.
A frustrated Sosabowski sent out search parties along the south bank in the gathering dusk to try and find other boats, or any means of flotation at all. They came back empty-handed. The Germans had made sure that this stretch of the river was craft-free. Meanwhile, they kept up their crossfire from the railway embankment and from the other side of the river, pinning down the Poles, who, having found no way over the river, pulled back from the water’s edge to the village of Driel for the night. Szmid and his comrades settled down in a barn. ‘Suddenly a shell exploded by the window where my friend Wladyslaw was standing. He was blown apart in front of me. He was covered in shrapnel wounds and his hands were hanging off his arms by threads of skin. He was still alive and he was chatting as we gave him some morphine and tried to help him, but I knew it was hopeless. We buried him outside.’ Shelling was now constant and frighteningly accurate. ‘The Germans were trying to annihilate us,’ Szmid recalled, ‘anxious to stop us reinforcing the British in Oosterbeek.’ But the Poles had the wrong weapons to hit back with. Their heavy equipment had dropped north of the river two days earlier and had largely fallen into enemy hands. They were left with just Sten guns – close-quarter weapons – against German artillery. It was no contest.
This was a grim time, reminiscent of grim times in the past. The frightened villagers of Driel were fleeing, leaving their homes and trudging away into the night carrying whatever they could on their backs. For many of the Poles it was a sadly familiar sight, bringing back memories of when they and their own families were refugees. And, with them gone, Driel was empty, ‘except for a lot of our soldiers running back and forth with the wounded on stretchers’. Szmid was scared but philosophical. ‘If a bullet came my way, then it came my way. After all, I could so easily have died back there in Siberia or Tashkent or on that ship on the Caspian Sea.’ He saw one of his comrades pick up a handful of the soft earth and run it through his fingers, so much darker and richer than the soil of his homeland, he reckoned, and ‘so beautiful you almost wouldn’t mind being buried in it’.
The next day, two senior British officers from Oosterbeek sneaked past the German positions on the north bank and made it across the river in a rubber dinghy. Urquhart had sent them with a desperate plea for reinforcements, though the sight of their filthy, bedraggled uniforms and haggard, battle-weary faces spoke as persuasively as their words. Any numbers would do, they urged Sosabowski. Even if only five or ten men managed to reach Oosterbeek they would be an incalculable boost to the morale of the exhausted defenders. The British had a handful of rubber dinghies, they said, and they were also making rafts, which they would send over. The Poles got to work themselves, lashing together planks, doors and ladders they found in the village, anything that might float. In the event, all these makeshift rafts sank like stones, but that night the British managed to send over their dinghies from the other side, and the first of the Poles prepared to embark.
They were handicapped from the start. There were no paddles, and the men on board would have to use spades, rifle butts and bare hands to propel themselves through the 10-knot current. They would have to be strong, and any drifting would be deadly. The British held a small patch of the opposite bank. To go off course would mean coming under enemy guns or falling into enemy hands. Nonetheless, the first wave made it over safely and the dinghies came back for more. A second trip was successful too but, on the third time, German flares suddenly lit up the river and bullets churned the surface of the water. Two dinghies sank and the remainder were so shot up they were unusable. In all, fifty men had managed to reach the other side. A rescue force had at last arrived.
As the Poles advanced from the river into Oosterbeek, they could see at once that they had stepped into a nightmare. The place was a shambles, overhung with the stench of burning houses and unburied dead. There were foxholes and graves in what had once been the wealthy suburb’s neat lawns and gardens. Hospitals and casualty stations were overflowing with wounded. The enemy bombardment was heavy and constant. They could actually hear German voices, so frighteningly close were the enemy to the defenders of the ever-contracting perimeter. But the newcomers were ecstatically welcomed by the paras who met them. It was a start. If more came, then who knew what might happen? In that desperate place, a little hope was renewed.
In Driel too, things began to look up when contact was made with the much-delayed XXX Corps, now at Nijmegen. From there, a reconnaissance patrol of Household Cavalry armoured cars was dispatched northwards at speed and rolled into the village. Over its radios, its men were now able to send on-the-spot reports of the situation back to command centre. New coordinates were passed back for the army’s big guns to target the Germans besieging Oosterbeek. Sosabowski was able for the first time to report to Browning, his overall commander, and swap briefings with Horrocks, the XXX Corps commander. An order was issued for twelve assault boats – which the Americans had just used to cross the River Waal under fire and capture the Nijmegen bridge – to be rushed forward through the Second Army traffic gridlock. In a boggy meadow leading to the river, the Poles waited impatiently for them to arrive. The plan was for the whole brigade to cross that night. They had been told each boat would carry eighteen men, and organized themselves into groups of the right size. ‘It was dark and raining, and we all got very wet and muddy,’ Szmid recalled. ‘The Germans suspected something was happening and, after putting up flares, proceeded to shell us.’
It was midnight when the boats arrived – and they turned out to be flimsy, with canvas sides and room for twelve men, not eighteen. A hurried reshuffle took place in the pitch dark, whispered orders, bodies falling over each other: chaos. With space on board now cut back, a third of the men were stood down to wait for a later crossing, Szmid among them. Finally, the boats were hauled across the boggy meadow and over a flood embankment to the river. As they set off into the current, flares popped into the sky, followed by an inferno of shells, bombs and bullets. There were many casualties. But the occupants of those that reached the other side slid overboard into the sticky mud of the north bank and ducked into the reeds. A British officer who stood by to guide them into Oosterbeek noted that they were wet and frightened but very determined. One w
as seen to pull out a bullet from a flesh wound in his leg with his fingers. These were hardened men and they had accounts to settle with the Germans.
In all, roughly two hundred Poles managed to get across that night to join the fight for Oosterbeek, a token force maybe, but their presence lifted spirits. Moving through the streets, they remembered heads popping out of trenches and wrecked window frames. British paras smiled through swollen lips and pleaded for cigarettes, which were tossed in their direction. The Poles took up defensive positions 600 yards from the Hartenstein in the south-eastern corner of the perimeter, some in houses, others in foxholes. An early-morning mortar attack was a shocking introduction to the realities of the dire military situation they had endured so much to join. Casualties were severe. One man lay dying, whispering for his mother in far-away Lvov. A lieutenant’s throat was ripped apart by a shard of shrapnel that found a gap beneath his chin.
Their presence did wonders for the morale of Private Bill Mollett, a bank clerk before the war, who had just spent hours on end at a window in the loft of a house, staring at a gap in the fence 150 yards in front of him and firing at the slightest movement. He was one of eleven men defending an isolated outpost on a crossroads, with orders, he recalled, to‘do or die’. Some were doing the latter. A mate was caught by a sniper’s bullet and died quickly, asking that someone tell his mother, and they were down to ten. The owner of the house struggled up from the cellar with a dish of cooked potatoes and spinach for them, and they felt better. Then, as an additional fillip, they saw movement in the abandoned house next door. ‘Some strange-looking blokes give me the thumbs-up and victory signs, and we realize they are the Poles, who jumped on the other side of the river and must now have got across. Everyone’s spirits rise and we give them covering fire while they move into our house and three other empty ones.’ 6
