Armageddon - Max Hastings [42]
JACK REYNOLDS and his unit, the South Staffs, were locked into the long, messy, bloody battle in the suburbs of Arnhem. There was no continuous front, no coherent plan, merely a series of uncoordinated collisions between rival forces in woods, fields, gardens and streets. “If anything moved, you fired.” A German tank shell landed beside Reynolds as he smoked a bulldog pipe. A blasted clod of earth drove the pipe down his throat, breaking half his front teeth. Dutch civilians craned from their homes in terrible innocence to watch the battle. The British kept imploring them to take cover. “Typically British—whenever we went into a house, we knocked on the door.” Reynolds possessed a low opinion of his own colonel, which was not improved when he heard the battalion padre demand anxiously, “Shouldn’t we protect the right flank?,” and the CO duly deployed a platoon as his spiritual adviser suggested. The young officer felt a mounting rage towards his commanders—“That was when it got home to me, what a very bad operation this was. The scales dropped from my eyes when I realized just how far from our objective, the bridge, we’d been landed. We knew what even a handful of Germans could do—they were so damned efficient.” During one endless night, as Reynolds crept from one position to another, he glimpsed a dark shape, groped forward and touched it. It was a German tank. He ran his hand down one of its tracks, then tiptoed away into the darkness: “I realized that we were completely overrun.” He and his little group were forced to surrender next morning.
Colonel John Frost’s men of 2 Para, holding the north end of Arnhem bridge, always understood that they had a simple task, albeit a herculean one: to survive. But for the rest of 1st Airborne Division, amid a complete breakdown of command and communications, it is hard to overstate the chaos that persisted throughout the battle. Units struggled piecemeal to resist German pressure on their shrinking perimeters. From beginning to end, most men were bewildered. “There was a lot of toing and froing among the officers about what we should do,” said Private Ron Graydon, a signaller with D Company of the Border Regiment. At one point, Graydon was detailed to accompany a platoon probing a wood beside the road. He was able to use the excuse of his signalling responsibilities to say, “I’m not going into that bloody wood.” Instead, he walked along the road. The platoon which went into the trees was not seen again for three days. Runner after runner was sent to the rear to describe the company’s plight, but none returned. Graydon once made contact with XXX Corps on his 18 set and provided a map reference of his own position. This was his only successful radio link-up throughout the battle. Eventually abandoning his useless wireless, the signaller became a rifleman and lay in a foxhole, watching his company hour by hour bleed to death. Suddenly one morning, he woke from an uneasy doze at dawn to find Germans all around them, amid silence. Firing had stopped. The Borderers’ survivors surrendered. “It was a total shambles.”
In his lonely attic in Arnhem police station, Bob Peatling was keeping a diary, to relieve the dreadful boredom. “I am getting fed up with hearing German voices,” he wrote, “and hope to wake up in the morning and hear a British sergeant-major blaspheming at his children in the approved style. This should make quite a historic diary, but personally, I would rather stay the quiet stay-at-home lad. There is no noise of any firing whatever. I can’t make it out. Field-Marshal Montgomery has dropped a clanger at Arnhem, but me a bigger one. I keep hoping for a sight of a Sherman tank.”
Along the 82nd Airborne’s stretch of the corridor more than ten miles southwards, Gavin’s men were fighting off German counter-attacks. The enemy had thrown into the battle replacement battalions of untrained conscripts and elderly First World War veterans. As they lay on their start line, one of the Germans called to his commander: “Captain,