Battle for Arnhem.... (4 Viewers)

[panda1gen]

There was a German outpost in the trees just north of the track which was the axis of the company approach.




It fired into the flank of the glider-pilot platoon.




Captain Muir was wounded. One of his officers, Lieutenant Sydney Smith, was fatally wounded, and there were several other casualties.



Without their leaders and in that confusing wood, the survivors went no further.




The dash led by Major Pott got across the road however. They moved well into the wood on the other side.

Lieutenant Watling's platoon also climbed out of the ditches at the side of the road to join in the rush, but Watling was killed at once. The company second in command, Captain Terry Rodgers, was also hit and fatally wounded.

 

[panda1gen]

The German defence was too strong for the lightly armed airborne men.

This was particularly the case with the German armoured vehicles.

 

[panda1gen]

Ref: Arnhem - 1944: The Airborne Battle by M. Middlebrook

Only Major Pott and a few men managed to get through the German line of defences and well into the trees.




Some were badly wounded, and one of them, Sergeant George Sheldrake, describes a moving incident:

'I was with another two lads; we were all in a pretty bad way. Major Pott came over and said that he couldn't take us with him but he put us carefully under some bushes. He said that the battalion might make a fresh attack, and we could be recovered; if not we would be picked up by the Germans. He had to leave us then but, before he moved off, he stood there and prayed over us - for a couple of minutes maybe, although there was some mortar and machine-gun fire, and a couple of minutes is a long time to stand up in those conditions. It is something I shall never forget'.

A Company's advance ended on its objective six hours after it had started, but with only six men left and John Pott himself twice wounded, one bullet smashing his thigh and another hitting him in the hand. Some of the survivors hid and were able to escape.



The Germans marched away the walking wounded ....






.... but left John Pott out in the open for the next eighteen hours, during which time he attempted to write a farewell letter to his wife with his left hand. He was found by two Dutchmen on the following day, carried to the nearby Mill Hill Fathers' house and eventually became a prisoner, the only one of six officers (including the glider pilots) in the A Company attack to survive.

Captain Muir later became a prisoner of war and was shot with a Royal Engineers officer, Lieutenant W. H. Skinner, at or near Renkum, in one of the few German prisoner-of-war atrocities in this battle.

 

[panda1gen]

Ref: Arnhem - 1944: The Airborne Battle by M. Middlebrook

It was not known at Battalion HQ that A Company had suffered so badly. A third company was sent forward at about 9.0 a.m. This was Major John Waddy's B Company on what was yet another left-flanking movement.




John Waddy describes how he received his orders:

“The Colonel didn't know the full situation. He thought there were only a few snipers about and said A Company had reached the road and B Company was to push through them and capture the Lichtenbeek feature. When he told me about the 'few snipers', I realized from the amount of fire we had already heard that there was more than that”.

‘When we moved up, it was obvious that A Company had received tremendous casualties, there were wounded coming back in Bren carriers .....




.... and dead chaps lying at the side of the road, and I passed a complete platoon headquarters all killed’.

Yet again, the attack came under heavy fire as it approached the Dreijenseweg. Here are two accounts which illustrate the difficulty of fighting in those woods.

Private Ted Reynolds:

‘I couldn't see where the Germans were and had to fire at where their fire seemed to be coming from. Things got quite bad. One of the first to be hit was the Number Two on my Bren, Private Ford. Suddenly he was laid on the ground, stone dead, with three neat little bullet holes in the throat. Funny enough, he had been a lovely singer. The platoon lost four or five men. I remember Dodds being shot in the chest or the neck, and Atkinson was hit in the neck, but it came out the other side without hitting the artery. I saw him walking back with blood spurting out of the side of his neck. They both survived.

A man came out of the woods with his hands up. He claimed to be a glider pilot and certainly wore a glider pilot's equipment. He told us to follow him, saying there were only young Germans ahead and we could easily go and get them. He spoke perfect English, but I am convinced that he was a German because he had come out of the bushes where the Germans were and he went back the same way when we refused to follow him. No one thought to stop him’.

Private Ron Atkinson was in the same platoon:

Then it happened - we walked right into it, fire from above, from our flanks, and even from behind. My platoon halted and took cover.




We saw a figure in khaki running towards us shouting some gibberish about where Jerry was. He turned out to be a glider pilot; he was lucky he didn't get shot from both sides.




Then we heard the clatter of tank tracks to our front and flank using the narrow paths among the trees. They let off everything they had at us: small arms, armour-piercing shells, high explosive, the lot.




Then we had an order to advance at the double - no point in waiting to be massacred. We must have advanced about 500 yards when we were ordered to halt and take cover again. I heard my stretcher bearer pal's Midlands accent asking for assistance, so me, being nosy, crawled over and found him with one arm limp due to a bullet in the shoulder, struggling to get our section sergeant on the stretcher. The latter was lying face down. I turned him on his back and proceeded to put my hands under his armpits while Harry held his legs.

Then it happened. Something struck me at the back of my neck; it felt like a back heel from a cart-horse. I remember feeling to see whether I still had a head on my shoulders and then looking at my hands and tunic sleeves covered in blood - my own blood! I dashed to the rear, to the first-aid post, moaning and groaning all the way.

 

[panda1gen]

Ref: Arnhem - 1944: The Airborne Battle by M. Middlebrook

Major Waddy was immediately behind the two platoons leading the attack:

‘I could hear the German armoured vehicles moving up and down the Dreijenseweg, quite a lot of vehicles. You could hear the Germans shouting.




Then a 20-millimetre anti-aircraft gun on the road opened up, firing high-explosive shells, and these had a deadly effect, bursting in the trees and flinging out small splinters, so that even though your men were on the ground trying to crawl forward, they were still getting killed or wounded.



Both leading platoons were held up at a clearing in front of us. We tried to dash across the clearing under cover of some aircraft which came low overhead - we thought they were RAF - and I went forward with some of my soldiers and Tom Wainwright, the Support Company commander, to try and knock this 20-millimetre gun out. We got up to within ten paces of it, and the man on my right was just about to throw a phosphorus grenade at it when he was drilled right through the head. What had happened was that there was a man sitting in a tree just above the gun and he was firing down at us.

I only had a pistol, instead of the German Schmeisser machine-gun I normally carried.




I fired half a magazine at him and missed, and then he hit me. I collapsed and started to crawl out, and he took another shot at me. Then one of my Rhodesian soldiers picked me up and carried me out’.




That virtually stalled the battalion attack. The events of the morning became known to Brigadier Hackett, and at 2.0 p.m. he ordered the battalion to disengage. Casualties had been about 50 per cent. It had been a purely infantry battle.

Captain Peter Chard of the Light Regiment had been with Battalion HQ throughout, but the country was so close that he had been unable to give any useful artillery support. Neither had the attached anti-tank troop been able to help; the 6-pounder was not an offensive weapon.




The battalion, with only one more or less intact company, pulled back to reorganize and await further orders.

 

[panda1gen]

Ref: Arnhem - 1944: The Airborne Battle by M. Middlebrook

The 10th Parachute Battalion - the Pumping Station Area Action

Brigadier Hackett did not intend that Lieutenant-Colonel Ken Smyth's battalion should make any major attack during the first phase of his brigade's operation. After spending the night near Brigade HQ at the Hotel Buunderkamp, the battalion set off at 4.30 a.m., making towards a road junction on the Amsterdamseweg where it was to 'occupy a firm base' to protect the left flank of the brigade's attack.




The first three miles of the approach march were made without too much difficulty, and the battalion's destination was almost reached with no greater danger than some long-range machine-gun fire which caused few casualties, though with the disturbing experience of meeting a succession of jeeps bringing back casualties from 156 Battalion's action.




The leading troops, Captain Cedric Horsfall's D Company, reached the designated junction on the wide Amsterdamseweg by 10.0 a.m. (the 10th Battalion did not have a C Company; the three rifle companies were A, B and D). Ken Smyth did not stop there but continued on in the direction of Arnhem. There are several unexplained aspects of this further move. There is no record of why Smyth proceeded further; possibly an unrecorded wireless message from Brigadier Hackett encouraged him to do so.




The battalion was thus approaching the next road junction, which was three-quarters of a mile closer to Arnhem, at the end of the Dreijenseweg near a hotel called the Leeren Doedel; but this was the northern end of the German blocking line on the Dreijenseweg, and the battalion would have to fight for that next road junction.




The personal accounts of several contributors show that they knew nothing of the 'occupy firm base' order but were under the impression that the battalion was following the original brigade plan made in England and continuing along the main road to get to its originally allocated position north of Arnhem.

D Company moved on through the wooded ground on the south side of the road, passing a pumping station called La Cabine on the northern side of the road, and then it suddenly came under fire from the outposts of the German blocking line on the Dreijenseweg.

 

[panda1gen]

Ref: Arnhem - 1944: The Airborne Battle by M. Middlebrook

The leading troops were approximately 300 yards short of the Leeren Doedel road junction. What happened next was a typical example of what was now becoming a familiar situation: the leading troops of an advancing unit suddenly coming under heavy fire from weapons fired from unseen positions in the woods.

First it was long bursts of machinegun fire ...




then mortars ...




then armoured vehicles firing from nearby roads and tracks.





The leading platoon went to ground and tried to return the fire. The leading company commander tried to manoeuvre one of his other platoons to make an outflanking attack, but men were fired upon as soon as they exposed themselves, and, if the platoon did start a flanking attack, it found that the German line was so extensive that no further progress could be made.

 

[Louis Badolato]

The more a read the excerpts from the first hand accounts the more I realize this operation was doomed from the start. Once it was obvious that there were significant German opposition there was no way lightly armed paratroopers could take much less hold both sides of the bridge. Additionally 30 Corps could not possibly advance up that one lane highway with resistance in the allotted time. Makes me really pussed at Boy Browning for disregarding the photo reconnaissance

 

[panda1gen]

The more a read the excerpts from the first hand accounts the more I realize this operation was doomed from the start. Once it was obvious that there were significant German opposition there was no way lightly armed paratroopers could take much less hold both sides of the bridge. Additionally 30 Corps could not possibly advance up that one lane highway with resistance in the allotted time. Makes me really pussed at Boy Browning for disregarding the photo reconnaissance

With hindsight it clearly was. They were serenely optimistic. I don't think it should have gone ahead as it was (hurriedly) planned either.

The poor co-ordination with the air forces - despite them coming under Air Force control - was especially poor. They effectively handed air superiority to the Luftwaffe - see my next planned post on the battle.

The Air Force leadership by Brereton was IMO very poor, starting with spurious reasons for not dropping the paras on their targets.


However we might try to see the reasons why it did:

A) SHAEF HQ were on record as expecting they might be in Berlin by December 1944 based upon the known losses the Germans suffered in Normandy. Most of the forces fighting in Holland were second or third class units and the elite forces were drastically under-strength in manpower and especially equipment.

B) The Allies had just advanced from Normandy to the Dutch border in less than a month, with no significant opposition.

C) They had captured the major port of Antwerp, which was big enough to supply the Allied advances. Pity the twerps didn't clear the Scheldt! -- this condemned Market Garden to failure as they let the 15th Army slip back to Holland to reinforce and they still couldn't use Antwerp. If they had done this first it might have been successful. What was SHAEF doing?

D) The Airborne forces were relatively fresh (6th Airborne, not 1st, had dropped in Normandy with the 101st and 82nd US Airborne).

E) Reinforcement of the Germans in Holland would be - and in fact was - limited (despite Hitler making it priority 1). The USSR had destroyed Army Group Centre and advanced hundreds of miles, so there would be no reinforcement available from the East. The Germans lost several million men in 1944. The night/day bombing offensive was in full swing, which should have reduced manufacturing capacity and reinforcement.

F) The V2's had just started hitting London, but could only do that from Holland. Failure to clear the limited V2's launch range could cost them the war.

As with all these things, it wasn't as simple as people might like.

 

[panda1gen]

To return to the battle:

Ref: Arnhem - 1944: The Airborne Battle by M. Middlebrook

Battalion HQ assessed the situation and decided upon their next move. They were aware that Lieutenant-Colonel des Voeux's response in 156 Battalion's earlier action had been to call forward a further company and order it to repeat the attack, hoping that determined pressure would break the German defence. It had not, and the company concerned had been ruined. Lieutenant-Colonel Smyth decided to proceed more cautiously.




He left D Company in contact with the Germans, carrying on a prolonged fire-fight.




He sent observers from his Intelligence Section forward in an attempt to establish the exact whereabouts of the German positions and then bring his 3-inch Mortar Platoon into action.




He then sent a message to Brigade HQ, asking whether he should commit his other companies in a much wider flanking move, crossing the main road in strength and trying to move forward through the woods on the north side of it. Permission was given, although this all took time.

There was no artillery support, either because of the close country or because of signalling difficulties.




There would be no friendly tank support until XXX Corps arrived.

 

[panda1gen]

Arnhem - 1944: The Airborne Battle by M. Middlebrook

There was also no close air support, as would have been enjoyed in large measure by conventional Allied ground troops at that time. This was because the planners in England had made no detailed preparations for liaison with the fighter-bomber squadrons available at the forward airfields in Belgium.








Many German fighters appeared during the day and supported their troops, a rare reversal of the air-support situation in 1944.






Most of these disadvantages had been shared by other battalions attacking in the Arnhem battle, but the 10th Battalion was brought to a halt here while making the 1st British Airborne Division's last major attempt to advance.

It highlights many of the shortcomings of the Arnhem operation: over-optimism about the German defence capabilities, too distant dropping and landing zones, and failure to employ over the battlefield the Allied air supremacy won at such cost in the earlier years of the war.

 

[Terp152]

C) They had captured the major port of Antwerp, which was big enough to supply the Allied advances. Pity the twerps didn't clear the Scheldt! -- this condemned Market Garden to failure as they let the 15th Army slip back to Holland to reinforce and they still couldn't use Antwerp. If they had done this first it might have been successful. What was SHAEF doing?

Two reasons for the failure to clear the Scheldt. 1. Inability of Eisenhower to issue clear and explicit orders to Montgomery, and failure to ensure they were carried out. 2. Failure of Montgomery to place a priority to the clearing operation and not reinforcing 1st Canadian Army to ensure success.