Battle for Arnhem.... (2 Viewers)

[panda1gen]

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

Monday 18th September 1944

Only one corner of the perimeter had been attacked during the night. This was a library or small school on the eastern side of the lower ramp held by Captain Eric Mackay and some men of A Troop, 1st Parachute Squadron. There were several covered approaches to what was really an exposed outpost, and the Royal Engineers found it difficult to hold.​

Sapper George Needham says:

We had started to prepare it for defence, by smashing the windows and pulling down the curtains, but we had only been there about ten minutes when the Germans attacked, throwing grenades into the rooms.




Captain Mackay decided that building was too vulnerable, so he ordered into the larger school building next door, where we joined B Troop. They objected and said,

'Bugger off; go find your own place,'

but Captain Mackay, being the man he was, persuaded them in no uncertain terms to let us in, and we started fortifying some of the empty rooms.




(The Royal Engineers were later joined in the school by Major 'Pongo' Lewis, the 3rd Battalion's company commander, and twelve of his men. There was some argument after the war between the sappers and the infantry over who was in command in this building, the Van Limburg Stirum School, during the subsequent three days of its defence. Captain Mackay, in an article in Blackwood's Magazine, claimed to have been in command and never mentioned the presence of the 3rd Battalion men. Major Lewis, in his short official report, did not mention the larger RE party. Both officers had been allocated this position separately, in the dark of that first night, and Major Lewis, though clearly the senior officer, probably did not interfere with Captain Mackay's handling of the larger sapper party.)

​

 

[panda1gen]

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

Dawn found the airborne men prepared for a day that would be full of incident. They had completed the preparations for the defence of the buildings they had occupied by breaking all the windows to avoid injury from flying glass, moving furniture to make barricades at the windows, filling baths and other receptacles with water for as long as the supply remained functioning; these were all basic lessons learned in their house-fighting training.




As soon as it started to get light, Major Munford wanted to begin registering the guns of No. 3 Battery of the Light Regiment on to likely targets:




'There was some reluctance to allow me to do this. Some people were still harking back to the time the paras had suffered from the results of 'drop-shorts' in North Africa, not by the Light Regiment. But I persisted and was allowed to register on the approach road at the south end of the bridge, only about six rounds, but we got both troops ranged on to it and recorded it'.




'Sheriff' Thompson, back at Oosterbeek, said it should be recorded as 'Mike One'; 'Mike' was 'M' for Munford.

Our signals back to the battery were working well. The first intruder into the area was a lorry 'full of dustbins clattering in the back', which drove in between the buildings overlooking the ramp and the offices which Brigade HQ was occupying. Trigger-happy airborne men shot it up from both sides; the driver, presumably a Dutchman on a routine refuse-collection round, was probably killed. A similar fate befell three German lorries which appeared, probably also on a routine errand and not knowing of the British presence.​

​

 

[panda1gen]

Germans taking a rest whilst they can ...

 

[panda1gen]

The German attacks soon started, mainly from the east. They did not yet know the precise strength or location of the British force, and the first attacks were only tentative probes by some old Mark III and IV tanks supported by infantry which were easily beaten off.




One tank reached the road under the bridge ramp and was fired upon by an anti-tank gun. Lieutenant Arvian Llewellyn-Jones, watching from a nearby building, describes how an early lesson about the recoil of a gun in a street was learned:

‘The gun spades were not into the pavement edge, nor firm against any strong barrier. The gun was laid, the order to fire given, and when fired ran back about fifty yards, injuring two of the crew. There was no visible damage to the tank.

​

It remained hidden in part of the gloom of the underpass of the bridge. The gun was recovered with some difficulty. This time it was firmly wedged. The Battery Office clerk, who had never fired a gun in his life, was sent out to help man the gun. This time the tank under the bridge advanced into full view and looked to be deploying its gun straight at the 6-pounder. We fired first. The aim was true; the tank was hit and it slewed and blocked the road’.

These early actions were followed by a period of relative calm, described by John Frost as,

'a time when I felt everything was going according to plan, with no serious opposition yet and everything under control'.







​

 

[panda1gen]

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



From the above reference, a sketch map of Frost's defensive stance at Arnhem Bridge.

 

[panda1gen]

Hauptsturmführer Viktor Graebner was the commander of the 9th SS Panzer Division's Reconnaissance Battalion …




... a unit of first-class troops well equipped with twenty-two armoured cars and half-tracked armoured personnel carriers.



​

Only the previous day his divisional commander had presented him with the ribbon and emblem of the Knight's Cross, awarded to him for bravery in Normandy. He had then led his unit over the bridge, before the British arrived there, on a sweep down the main road to Nijmegen.

Finding that area all clear, he turned back and was now preparing to return over the bridge to reach his divisional command post in Arnhem. He knew the British were at the north end of the bridge now; whether he actually intended to mount an attack or just dash through the British positions is not known.

​