Armageddon - Max Hastings [41]
Captain Karl Godau, commanding a 105mm battery of 10th SS, was astounded when he saw the British stop that night. Godau never forgot the first Market Garden battles, because they fell on his thirty-first birthday. He had been a Waffen SS officer since 1938, with long service on the Eastern Front. He joined the panzers in Holland after a spell with a reserve regiment while he convalesced from wounds. On 17 September, his unit received the Alarm message at 1400, and soon afterwards was strafed by fighter-bombers as it moved forward, losing some trucks. Godau’s four guns were sited within yards of the Eindhoven road, as the first Shermans rolled towards them. He spoke to the headquarters of Kampfgruppe Walther, and urged that his battery should not open fire at close range. Once they did so, revealing their own positions, they would have no hope of withdrawing to fight again, even if they knocked out a few Shermans. Godau’s commander agreed, and ordered the battery to relocate a thousand yards further back, as the battle raged in front. There they waited for the British that evening. But the British did not come. “Their attack could have worked,” said Godau wonderingly. “We had so little. If they had kept going that night, there was nothing worth mentioning between their halting place and Eindhoven.” But moving tanks at night on a single-road front was a hazardous business, which the rulebook for armoured operations strongly discouraged. XXX Corps stopped.
Although British attention focused upon the enemy’s self-propelled guns and 88mms, Germans say that on the first day most of the damage was done to the British armoured column by infantry armed with fausts, firing at point-blank range from ditches beside the road. It should be stressed that the defenders did not find these encounters agreeable; indeed they found them shocking affairs, in which they suffered casualties of around 50 per cent, most from fighter-bombers and artillery fire. German communications were shattered. Small parties of men were fighting when they met British forces, then falling back as best they could. Kurt Student’s so-called First Fallschirmjäger Army, in reality amounting scarcely to a division, was split down the middle by the Allied advance, and despaired of its own position. But, in a battle in which speed was vital, Student’s men had already inflicted crippling delay on the British.
Next morning, 18 September, the Guards met little opposition until they reached the village of Aalst, and thereafter at a bridge over the Dommel, where four 88mm guns covered the road. The tankmen called for air strikes, and were furious to discover that these were unavailable. Despite bright sunshine over Holland, the RAF’s airfields in Belgium were fogged in. After two hours of fighting, however, British luck changed. A reconnaissance group found a track by which it outflanked the defenders, then charged them from the rear and cleared the road. An hour later, Guards tanks were crawling through hysterically cheering Dutch crowds in Eindhoven. Men of the American 101st said later that the people of Holland gave them their warmest welcome of the war. They loved it. One of Taylor’s men observed that he found the Dutch a great deal more sympathetic than the British.
At 1930 on Monday, Guards Armoured reached the bridge at Son. The Allies now controlled twenty-eight miles of the sixty-five-mile corridor to Arnhem.