A Bridge Too Far Page 11

  ‘The MO wrapped my leg up; it wasn’t very serious, just a bit awkward to walk and made for the door to try and find my way back to my platoon. The MO stopped me. He had received information that we were surrounded and it was only a matter of hours before we were captured. He would appreciate it if I would stay and help him with the walking wounded. We got a bed sheet, pinned a red cross on it with some red curtains and hung it outside in a prominent a place as we could. Then we just sat and waited.

  ‘As dawn broke there was a hammering on the door and when I opened it there stood two Germans with guns at the ready. The MO and I gathered together all the wounded who could walk and lined them up outside. We straggled off to captivity’.

  ‘Long forgotten memories sometimes drift back through my mind. Sounds as well as sights. Why does a man’s scream sound so much worse than a woman’s?

  ‘A jeep that had been hit by a flamethrower the driver sitting there like a pile of grey ash shaped in the figure of a man. A puff of wind would blow it away.

  ‘Three Germans laying on the ground their heads disappearing into a hole in the ground.’

  As Len Moss and his men appeared at the river a tired looking officer strode over. He told them to make their way down to the bank and start a new line. They made their way to where large wooden boats powered by motors or oars, manned by big Canadian engineers who looked like lumberjacks, were heading for the shore. The ferrying took place under mortar and machine gun fire from German positions, which was becoming increasingly accurate. One large wooden launch was hit by a mortar shell in mid-stream and exploded like match wood before sinking with everyone on board. Along the banks hundreds of men wait under threat from the enemy waited in lines for the boats to return from the far bank. In the dark, with machine guns chattering in the distance, many decided to swim for it. The enemy fire was intensifying. Flares almost permanently illuminated the night sky. Moss and his men stood in line patiently, crouching down to keep warm and present a small target to any opportunist German mortar shells that continued to scream overhead, splashing into the water which is filled with increasing numbers of men attempting to swim to freedom. As soon as the boats unloaded on the far bank they set off back to pick up more men. Each time they were soon overloaded with the wounded and men desperate to escape.

  At last it looked as if a boat was going to pick up Moss and the men queuing behind him. The rowers had shipped oars vertically but the boat had lost its way and momentum just a few yards from the shore. Soaked to the skin anyway and without hesitation Moss jumped into the water and strode out into the river up to his neck. Choking on a mouthful of water Moss grabbed the gunwale and started to pull the boat back towards shore. The river bottom had shelved quite deeply and he struggled to make progress but eventually the boat met the steep river bank. He tried to scramble up the bank and a pair of hands came down from the boat and pulled him on board. A big Canadian engineer put a blanket around him. The other soldiers were helped aboard while Moss sat at the back of the boat shivering like a small child under a blanket. From his position he could see the lines of troops with ‘lost, lonely, cold faces’ waiting to be rescued. Machine gun fire continued to rake the water. Dead soldiers floated past face down, carried on the current. Moss had nothing but admiration for the Canadian engineers as they ferried soldiers across the river all night. It never occurred to him that he could not swim and he felt a little guilty at having jumped the queue; ‘but what the hell’. ‘I would like to thank them from the bottom of my heart.’

  Soon the Canadians were rowing the big boat across the river and Moss, crammed in with his colleagues, started to relax. For the first time in eight days Moss felt relatively safe. As soon as the boats landed, teams of men helped the paratroopers disembark. They were herded away by medics, men with blankets and officers, all trying to make sense of the whole scene. Shivering against the cold night air, a blanket around his shoulders, Moss went with the flow and soon found that the sound of mortar and machine gun fire was receding. Over an earthen bank, down onto a road and towards the nearby village of Driel, columns or tired weary paratroopers made their way to safety. An eerie silence hung over the village; smoke rose on the horizon. Soldiers were all around, sitting and resting, or marching on to some new place. Only the crunch, crunch, crunch of their booted feet on the gravel broke the quiet. No one said anything. They were all too tired. Moss broke away from the main marching column and approached several mud-caked paratroopers sharing a cigarette by the roadside. He saw one wearing the beret of the 11th Parachute Battalion.

  ‘As I looked around’ Moss recalled ‘I saw tired faces everywhere, grimy, proud, undefeated faces and I wanted to cry. I didn’t recognise anybody and I had no idea how many others had made it. We had all been through so much together. Everywhere I looked I saw the eyes of men who had seen too much, given too much. Everywhere I looked I saw a hero. But for every man that had escaped many more had died, been wounded or captured and they had no one to tell their story. My experiences in those eight days would remain with me for the rest of my life.’

  Lieutenant Joe Hardy of the Signals Platoon, HQ Company, 1st Battalion, The Border Regiment who safely withdrew across the Rhine with the rest of the Division remarked, ‘We were greeted as conquering heroes. After all, we had knocked off quite a lot of the enemy; we had been surrounded by a far superior force; and we had fought our way out. It hardly seemed necessary at the time to tell people that we had sneaked out through the back entrance.’

  ‘It was worth doing’ wrote Goeffrey Powell. ‘I have never met anyone who has regrets. We had been together for three years. Most were killed; the lucky ones were wounded. I was one who did not get a serious wound.’

  After his lucky escape across the Neder Rijn, Derrick Shingleton celebrated his return by cabling Celia his WAAF fiancée: ‘Getting married on Monday - what are you doing?’ Happily, they tied the knot. On 24 March when 1,696 aircraft and gliders landed 21,680 troops of the 17th US Airborne Division and 6th British Airborne Division, east of the Rhine as part of a river crossing by British XII Corps near Wesel, Shingleton piloted a glider filled with men and equipment for a field ambulance.28

  Trooper John William Bateman recalled: ‘The continuous rain which was very depressing, I feel, saved our lives in the end. We quickly made our way to the river bank, holding the jumping smock of the man in front of us, following the white tape through the trees. We could hear the German sentries talking, but just felt numb. In all this period of time, we had no food whatsoever and only rain water to drink. Ten days we had fought and stood together. I had lost four stones in weight. I will never know how I managed to cross the river. I just got into a boat, one of the lucky ones, as so many did not make it to safety. Eventually on arrival at the other side, I walked to Nijmegen and was put on a plane which flew me to England. They put me into Dudley Guest Hospital where I remained for 6 months, my speech was gone and it took 3 months for it to return. My mother walked past my bed and did not recognise me.29

  Having vacated the Mill Hill Fathers’ House, the brothers and sisters arrived at the Karmel at around 1800 on Tuesday evening. In the cellar under the sisters’ chapel the brothers found a place to stay. There was just enough room for the 19 mattresses which were put on the ground in the evening and cleared in a corner in the morning. The cellar was also the recreation room. It was good living, although a bit difficult at night to not trample over someone when having to leave the room. Several days’ later Brother Philip Bruggeman, with the permission of the rector, went on a bicycle to the Johanna Hoeve to find out what had happened there. There were rumours that there had been severe fighting and much had been destroyed. Later he went on to see his uncle, a priest at Oosterbeek. He passed the Lichtenbeek at the Amsterdamsestraatweg and found burning cars, a tank and some trees broken like matches. There were parachutes with the baskets attached still hanging from some of the trees. At the beginning of the Johanna Hoeve road two bodies of English soldiers were lying there. Th
ey were probably hiding behind the trees but a sniper got them. A big hole had been shot through the upper storey of the Evers farm and there were no windows and doors anymore. There was nobody there; they had probably run. The van Maanen farm was burned out completely. Even so the granary and stables beside the house and two tall silos were still standing. The house of Mr Hoogendam and his family, besides some shelling had not suffered much. There was not much left of the house of the mother and two sisters Hoogendam. The milkery, bakery, horse stables and pig sties were all burned out. In amongst the debris were the remains of some burnt pigs and calves. The long cow stable still stood. Along the road several dead Englishmen and Germans lay, almost brotherly, next to each other. At the big Waltdfriede house there were only some black walls left. In the meadow in front of the Waltdfriede there were about a dozen dead cows lying with their legs up and their bellies swollen.

  In Oosterbeek Philip Bruggeman came on the Dreijenseweg and just around the corner there was a dead horse without a wagon. On the bridge over the railroad he saw the electricity lines lying cut on the railway line and there also were many parachutes. Further along the Stationsweg were burned out houses, badly damaged, some completely gone. On the pavement every now and then was an English or German soldier. In the middle of the road was an old man, his eyes popped out and all of his limbs were broken. He was still wearing his glasses. Along the Utrechtseweg it was a very big mess. Telegraph poles on the road, wires all over the place, trees broken, a burned out van with bicycles in it, a German tank, bomb craters and destroyed houses. The street was almost empty. One or two shy civilians walked very carefully on the side of the road. This was Oosterbeek, once a beautiful village along the Veluwe, after the failed liberation.

  At around 1000 Philip Bruggeman came to the vicarage. It was hard to reach the front door because of all the shell holes. He looked through the window but only saw a big mess in the heeroom’s room, but there was no-one. Suddenly the door opened and the housekeeper, Regien, came out. Bruggeman did not know who was the happiest. Aalthough they saw each other two weeks before they greeted each other as if it were ten years. The heeroom was out on his bike and was expected back at around 1100. The other girl came out too to see who was there. They told stories of Englishmen in the tower. An English chaplain who visited was taken away by the ‘Hauptmann’ and they had been accused of helping the English. There was the death penalty for helping the English, but it was a narrow escape, the direct hit of the vicar’s bedroom and all the emotions of the last days. They showed Philip Bruggeman the damaged vicarage and church before he left.

  He went back through the Mariaweg to see destruction everywhere. He did not see one undamaged house. Beside the road, on the pavement, were a dozen bodies. English on one side of the road, Germans on the other side. Further along the Cronjestraat was an English cannon. The gunner lay behind it, probably hit by a sniper. He had fallen onto the street and a car or tank had driven over his head. Philip passed some Germans who luckily did not stop him. He was very afraid that they would force him to bury the dead. He was very happy to at last cross the railway bridge again and was home at the Karmel by suppertime. Father Bruggeman and his fellow priests had to leave their sanctuary in Karmel and thereafter led a wandering existence as refugees until the end of the war.30

  By noon on 27 September the long ordeal was over. The Division, which had started 10,095 strong, including the glider pilots, had by then lost 7,605 officers and men in killed, wounded and missing. Now at last it was at Nijmegen; and there, in a large red-brick school in a quiet tree-bordered thoroughfare, an issue of tea, rum, food and one blanket a man was made. Some who had arrived earlier in the day received a less formal welcome from the sea-borne elements of the Division, who were awaiting them, having advanced 700 miles through France, Belgium and Holland. Captain Scott Malden, for example, one of the Divisional Intelligence officers, reached Headquarters clad in several yards of flannel secured by a belt. He was given a breakfast which consisted of half a tumbler of Cointreau, a large bowl of Irish stew and then a small glass of the same liqueur. After this he slept without moving for twelve hours. Others were provided with the like good cheer and soon that school at Nijmegen, set aside for their reception, was echoing with the voices of weary men who had passed through an ordeal few have been called upon to face in this war or in any other. They had suffered much, they were weary beyond measure, but they were sustained by that most potent aid to recovery, the knowledge that they had done all and more than their duty. Behind them, on the other side of the turbid stream, many of their comrades still remained. These belonged to those elements of the Division who had penetrated deeply into Arnhem in an effort to reinforce the 2nd Parachute Battalion at the head of the bridge. Many of them were lying wounded or dead in Arnhem and its outskirts; many were prisoners, captured in the wrecks of burning houses, their ammunition spent; but many were wandering among the woods or farms, or hiding in the back streets of the little town. They lived there for weeks, cared for by the Dutch, who to do so showed a spirit of cunning, fortitude and courage which may justly be called sublime.

  Just before the surrender Helmut Buttlar had been appointed to act as a transport leader for the prisoners and off he went to Apeldoorn in a captured Land-Rover, with several wounded ‘Tommies’ and a German driver. ‘The further the vehicle got from the battle area, the more Dutch people were standing around motionless and quiet on the edge of the road. One of the wounded English soldiers, an older sergeant, knew some German and inquired how old I was and asked whether, at my age, I had fought at all at the front. When I said ‘nineteen’ and also proudly announced that I had already fought with the SS Armoured Division ‘Frundsberg’ in April in Russia and in the summer in Normandy, he just said pensively, that they would not have been defeated by a German troop other than the Waffen-SS. As we then went our separate ways in Apeldoorn, we ‘enemies’ wished one another all the best for the future with a handshake. There were no more malicious shouts. And after that I never heard the word ‘Moff’ again.’

  Years after the Battle, Obersturmbannführer Walther Harzer, who had received his Knight’s Cross directly from Bittrich, wrote, ‘It is with personal pride that I regard this German victory, because it was achieved not by regular units, but by railway workers, Arbeitsdienst and Luftwaffe personnel as well, who had never been trained for infantry work and were actually unsuitable for house-to-house fighting.’ Following operation ‘Market-Garden’ Albert Speer visited the front lines and had an opportunity to meet General Bittrich. Speer later wrote: Other visits (to the front) showed me that efforts were being made on the Western Front to arrange agreements with the enemy upon special problems. At Arnhem I found General Bittrich of the Waffen-SS in a state of fury. The day before, his Second Tank Corps had virtually wiped out a British airborne division. During the fighting the general had made an arrangement permitting the enemy to run a field hospital behind the German lines. But party functionaries had taken it upon themselves to kill captured British and American pilots and Bittrich looked like a liar. His violent denunciation of the party was all the more striking since it came from an SS general.’

  According to Heinz Höhne, Bittrich vowed to support a plot against the Nazi regime on 15 July 1944 when he met Erwin Rommel and promised that he and his troops were at Rommel’s disposal if the Field Marshal so requested, but like many he warned that Hitler had to be removed from power first. This condition was never met. Bittrich is also reported to have been the most sarcastic man in Germany. He was allegedly marked for death by Heinrich Himmler in 1945 as a result of the extremely unflattering comments he made about the Nazi leadership. In any case it is known that his superiors tried to replace him by force several times; during ‘Market-Garden’ Himmler had sent ‘Reichsarzt-SS’ Karl Gebhardt to relieve Bittrich from his command and bring him back to Berlin. After his unit had been tasked with the defence of Vienna in spring 1945, Bittrich immediately pulled his troops out of the city to save it from destr
uction despite the order to hold Vienna ‘to the last breath’. After his arrest on 8 May he was extradited to France on charges of having ordered the execution of 17 members of the Resistance in Nîmes. The trial revealed that Bittrich had not given such an order and had even opened procedures against the responsible officers. As the commander in charge of the culprits, he was held responsible for the misconduct of his subordinate troops and sentenced to five years in prison. The sentence was considered as served after a long pre-trial detention. He was put on trial for a second time on 22 June 1953 but was once again acquitted by the French court and he was released in 1954.31

  Following Arnhem, the paras returned to their base at Melton Mowbray. At a civic dinner held in their honour, Captain Piers St. Aubyn MC was told that there was ‘a young lady’ at the door. Thinking that it was his girlfriend, he strolled out with a glass of wine and a cigar; he was shocked to find his batman’s widow, who had come up from London to ask how her husband had been killed.32

  ‘Operation ‘Market-Garden’ was over’ recalled John Slatterley. ‘Arnhem was a deserted town as we were driven through it on our way to prison camps and hospitals away from the crippled bridge that had been held so helplessly, the bridge to freedom now a twisted ruin, its broken fingers washed by the river Rhine. I had taken no part in the cruel battle.’

  ‘Market-Garden’ Timeline

  Monday 25 September (D+8) Following the failure of the crossing on the night of 24/25 September the decision is reached that the 1st Airborne Division will be withdrawn; this information is passed to Urquhart that morning. 0808 Urquhart signals Thomas that the evacuation, codenamed Operation ‘Berlin’, must take place that night. Artillery and 81 close-support sorties by 2nd TAF helps the British troops hold out for another day.