Armageddon - Max Hastings [40]
At the bridge engagement was not continuous. There were long intervals of inactivity, even boredom, for the paratroopers of Frost’s A Company, while the Germans prepared their next move. “In some ways, the silences were the worst,” said John Killick. “There was the apprehension, and then the sound of engines starting around the corners, followed by the grinding, squealing clatter of tracks, and the sudden terrible sight of a tank coming round the corner, traversing its turret towards you.” It is interesting to speculate whether the battle might have been transformed had the British possessed a hand-held anti-tank weapon as good as that of the Germans, whose Panzerfaust frustrated many Allied attacks in the last year of the war. As it was, the British soldiers holding the north end of Arnhem bridge found themselves being relentlessly bombarded towards destruction, without the means to do much about it. “Everything was on fire,” said John Killick. “It was a hellish scene.” British ammunition was running out fast. The paratroopers in and around Arnhem, some nine battalion groups strong, now faced fourteen equivalent German units, which also possessed an overwhelming superiority in armoured vehicles and support weapons. Hereafter, the balance of forces would continue to shift relentlessly in the Germans’ favour.
THE BRITISH LAND dash for Arnhem was commanded by the much loved Brian Horrocks of XXX Corps. “A tall, lithe figure,” according to Chester Wilmot, “with white hair, angular features, penetrating eyes and eloquent hands, Horrocks moved among his troops more like a prophet than a general.” “At the time, we liked Horrocks’s affability and effervescence,” said Captain David Fraser of the Guards Armoured Division. “Later, I came to think that he was a superficial character.” Horrocks had brought with him from the North African desert a reputation as a driving leader. Yet from the outset almost everything that could go wrong with XXX Corps’s breakout from their bridgehead on the Meuse–Escaut canal did so.
The 17 September operation began with a bombardment at 1415, pounding the German defences on a front a mile wide and five miles deep. The Irish Guards, leading the British advance, enjoyed a few illusory moments of optimism. Their Sherman tanks, adorned with huge orange phosphorescent panels to identify them to circling RAF Typhoons, sped away up the road at 1435. Then the Germans opened fire with machine-guns and Panzerfausts from well-concealed positions in neighbouring trees and ditches. It became plain that XXX Corps’s bombardment had failed to suppress the defences. Half the leading squadron of Shermans was destroyed within minutes. British infantry advanced towards the woods to winkle out the opposition. Heavy air strikes were called in. The Germans had deployed elements of five battalions, mostly SS and paratroopers, with the dubious assistance of a penal unit. Many of the Germans holding the road had escaped from Belgium with Fifteenth Army, through the gap so disastrously left open by the British beyond Antwerp a fortnight earlier.
Horrocks had hoped that his tanks would be in Eindhoven within two hours. Instead, by nightfall they had advanced only seven miles. Among the German dead, to their alarm they identified men from 9th SS and 10th SS Panzer, General Student’s First Parachute Army and Fifteenth Army. The enemy units defending the road were under strength, sketchily organized and ill equipped, but they