Arnhem: Ten Days in the Cauldron

For those who fought,

along with their families and loved ones

and for the civilians caught in the middle of it all

Concise Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations

British Ranks

General

Non-Commissioned Officer NCO

Commanding Officer CO

Royal Air Force

Flight Lieutenant Flt Lt

Army Ranks

Private / Trooper Pte / Tpr

Lance Corporal L/Cpl

Corporal Cpl

Lance Sergeant L/Sgt

Sergeant Sgt

Staff Sergeant SSgt

Sergeant Major Sgt Maj

Provost Sergeant Provo Sgt

Regimental Sergeant Major RSM

Army Officer Ranks

Lieutenant Lt

Captain Capt

Major Maj

Lieutenant Colonel Lt Col

Colonel Col

Brigadier (US Brigadier General) Brig (US: Brig Gen)

Major General Maj Gen

Lieutenant General Lt Gen

General Gen

Field Marshall FM

Navy

Lieutenant Commander Lt Cdr

British Units

General Unit Abbreviations

Battalion Bn

Brigade Bde

Company Coy

Division Div

Regiment Regt

Specific Unit Abbreviations

1st Border Regiment Border Regt / ‘Borders’

Air Landing Brigade Air Ldg Bde

Airborne Division Airborne Div

Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron Airborne Recce Sqn

Army Air Corps AAC

Dorsetshire Regiment ‘Dorsets’

Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry DCLI

Independent Parachute Company Indep Para Coy

King’s Own Scottish Borderers KOSB

Office of Strategic Services OSS

Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry ‘Ox and Bucks’

Parachute Brigade Para Bde

Parachute Field Ambulance PFA

Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers Para Sqn RE

Royal Air Force RAF

Royal Army Medical Corps RAMC

Royal Artillery RA

Royal Engineers RE

Special Air Service SAS

Special Operations Executive SOE

South Staffordshire Regiment ‘South Staffs’ / ‘Staffs’

Tactical Air Force TAF

United States Army Air Force USAAF

German Ranks

* with British Rank Equivalent

Waffen SS Ranks

Rottenführer L/Cpl

Scharführer Sgt

Untersturmführer Lt

Hauptsturmführer Capt

Sturmbannführer Maj

Obersturmbannführer Lt Col

Standartenführer Col

Obergruppenführer Lt Gen

Wehrmacht Ranks

Obersdeutnant Lt Col

Generaloberst Gen

Generalfeldmarschall FM

‘And the Germans themselves had coined

their own name for our tiny perimeter.

They were calling it The Cauldron.’

—Major General Roy Urquhart,

Officer Commanding,

1st Airborne Division¹

From Arnhem, Urquhart’s own account of the battle. In this book ‘The Cauldron’ encompasses the turbulent situation the Airborne troops were plunged into from the moment their boots hit Dutch soil.↩︎

The symbol of all British Airborne Forces since 1942 is often referred to as the Pegasus emblem but in fact shows both the famous winged horse of Greek mythology and the warrior Bellerophon said to be swooping through the air to destroy a monster.

Prologue

‘…alone and unheralded,

like thieves in the night.’

—By Air to Battle: The Official Account of the British Airborne Divisions

The roaring four-engined Halifax bomber has towed the Horsa glider up into the sky from Tarrant Rushton airfield in Dorset, southern England. It is one of six such combinations taking off at around 10.30pm on 5 June 1944.

Thirty soldiers belonging to D Company (Coy) in the 2nd Battalion (Bn), The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, are crammed into the lead glider along with their weaponry and equipment.

They sit down the sides of the Horsa, facing each other and enduring uncomfortable, hard wooden seats for their flight into history. Lieutenant (Lt) Den Brotheridge, 26-year-old commander of 25 Platoon, sits opposite 31-year-old Major (Maj) John Howard, the assault commander of Operation Deadstick. They, and 150 men carried in the other five gliders, will be among the first – if not the first – Allied troops to touch the soil of enemy occupied France on D-Day.

After many months of planning, training and gathering of military might across the British Isles, the Ox and Bucks are going in ahead of many tens of thousands of Allied soldiers, airmen, and sailors. They are all engaged in a massive, multi-dimensional military enterprise – filling the air, covering the sea (even lurking under it) and soon also to be projected ashore.

Most of the soldiers in the lead glider come from London and during the flight they sing cockney songs, puff on cigarettes, chatter, and joke. It does not entirely succeed in covering up the unnerving screaming wind forcing its way through the plywood covering of the timber-framed fuselage.

The troops watch Maj Howard closely to see if he will, as usual, succumb to airsickness and vomit. Tonight, he disappoints them, for he is so keyed up with adrenalin – his mind buzzing with thoughts about the mission to come – that he forgets to follow his usual custom.

Looking out a window as the glider is towed over the Channel, Lance Corporal (L/Cpl) Edward Tappenden, the company radio operator, sees invasion shipping below when the moon shines on the sea through a break in the cloud. He feels it looks ‘as though you could step from ship to ship to France for certain…’¹

To guarantee stealth, at nine minutes past midnight, as the French coast slides under them – and having exploited a gap in enemy Anti-Aircraft (AA) battery defences over Cabourg – the Halifax tugs let the gliders go, at between 5,000ft and 6,000ft. The enemy believes what approaches is just another bombing raid. As extra cover for their true intent, the Halifaxes will go on to bomb enemy targets along with other Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers flying across the Channel at the same time.

The divorce from the tug is signified by what one Airborne soldier on the mission describes as ‘the familiar twang and jerk’² as the tow rope releases and falls away. With the rotary racket of the tug fading, Maj Howard shouts out to his men: ‘Be quiet now!’³ The soldiers fall silent, the lead Horsa diving steeply to get below the clouds, so the two pilots can navigate by studying the landscape laid out at their feet.

The glider creaks and groans, the scream of air replaced by a calmer ‘sighing’⁴ as the Horsa levels off at 1,000ft.

Lt Brotheridge undoes his safety belt and stands up. As he opens the door just behind the cockpit, Maj Howard and Tappenden hang onto him to make sure he doesn’t accidentally exit the aircraft. A soldier at the back of the glider opens its other door.

Settling back down, Lt Brotheridge, Maj Howard and other soldiers near the doors watch as the Norman landscape flashes by below, inhaling the ‘sweet, damp air’.⁵ Howard finds it has ‘an amazing tranquillising effect’. They spot horses and cattle grazing ‘very, very quietly’⁶ in fields laid out in a similar patchwork to those back home. The animals are unperturbed by the glider’s passage close overhead.⁷

Six platoons of the Ox and Bucks – one to each of the Horsas – are tasked with taking two bridges a quarter of a mile apart in an audacious coup de main attack. They are accompanied in each Horsa by half a dozen Royal Engineer sappers whose job it will be to defuse and remove any demolition charges attached to the bridges. One of them spans the River Orne, near the village of Ranville, and the other the Caen Canal, close to the village of Benouville. Three gliders and 90 troops are assigned to assault and capture each bridge. It is archetypal use of Airborne forces – taking a gamble by coming down right on top of an objective to achieve total surprise. While it might cost a few casualties it should, with luck, swiftly deliver success. As one official history will later term it, the aim of the Ox and Bucks is to ‘arrive at the bridges alone and unheralded, like thieves in the night.’⁸

The chosen troops and their glider pilots have for months trained intensively. The glider pilots scrutinised aerial reconnaissance photos of the actual bridges in Normandy and their surroundings, though they were not told where it was they were studying until just hours before take-off on the night of the attack itself. The glider pilots also repeatedly watched an astonishingly realistic film that presented a low-level fly-through, using a model of the target.⁹ It had every detail realised in miniature, from German pillboxes to each bush and tree. The glider pilots memorised the landing spots and timings of their approach – the exact moment to follow a certain bearing for a certain duration after release from the tug, including when to take precise turns. They also rehearsed it for real, getting everything down to the split-second during simulated landings in the English countryside. These included a rehearsal of the raid itself, against bridges at Lechlade, a quiet and ancient little town on the southern edge of the Cotswolds.

The Ox and Bucks trained for their part in the mission at the Countess Wear bridges, near Exeter where, like the target in Normandy, there was a canal and river right next to each other. The troops used trucks in place of gliders, tumbling out of the back of them as if disembarking from Horsas. Had the troops and gliders trained with each other it would have risked death or injury, while making public the exact nature of the mission.

Training mishaps were still to be expected and thankfully there were not too many. One night in May 1944, during a night landing at Tarrant Rushton, a glider was released too far from the airfield, touched down safely but went through a hedge and slammed into a country lane with its nose wheel pushed up through the cockpit. Neither pilot was injured.¹⁰

During a landing rehearsal on Salisbury Plain there was a collision between gliders, with one spearing the other, while three others were involved in a landing pile up – again, miraculously, there were no deaths or injuries except for one pilot suffering a broken toe.¹¹ The fact that the fragile Horsas are largely made of wood and crumple on impact and that there is no fuel to catch fire helps avoid deaths in such situations.

One piece of new intelligence picked up via sources in France, and seemingly confirmed by an RAF photo-reconnaissance flight, is that poles appear to have been erected right where the gliders are to land alongside the canal bridge. Maj Howard worries about these a great deal and, just before the mission, asks the enthusiastic 24-year-old chief pilot of his glider, Staff Sergeant (SSgt) Jim Wallwork, if it is feasible to land safely in such a thicket. Wallwork replies that the distance between the poles is just right for clipping the wings of a glider and bringing it to a halt.

As the lead glider swoops low over Normandy, Howard resists the urge to stand up and place himself between the two pilots to watch their final approach to target – just to see if his fears about the poles are correct. He realises the pilots don’t need him looking over their shoulders as they concentrate on the job at hand.

As they bring the glider in, Wallwork and co-pilot SSgt John Ainsworth find everything faithfully matches the photos and fly-through film. Wallwork sees the ‘the river and the canal-like strips of silver in the moonlight.’¹² The burning city of Caen, around seven miles away, which has just been pounded by the Halifax bombers, acts as a useful navigation beacon. The glider flies inland towards Caen, takes a right turn, and then another to approach from the south for a landing by the canal bridge on its east side. The pilots work with intense focus, using a compass, and counting off the seconds to each turn on a stopwatch illuminated by a small lamp.

Wallwork yells out to the soldiers in the back:

‘Hold tight!’

As trained, they link arms and raise their feet, the better to avoid broken bones and, hopefully, not go flying all over the place when the glider lands. Like a huge black bat, the Horsa swooshes out of the night, hitting the earth at 120mph and bouncing. Its undercarriage is torn off, the metal skid protecting the Horsa’s belly striking sparks that are initially mistaken by those inside it for enemy fire. A parachute is released out the back of the glider to arrest its speed, which comes down to 60mph.

As the glider finally yields to the impact, there is a great splintering of wood, but there are no poles sticking out of the ground, merely holes where they are soon to be placed. Private (Pte) Denis Edwards recounts of the landing: ‘There followed a sound like a giant canvas sheet being viciously ripped apart, then a mighty crash like a clap of thunder and my body seemed to be moving in several directions at once.’¹³

It is 12.16am.

The D-Day invasion has begun.

The Horsa smashes into a large cluster of barbed wire below an embankment that carries the road leading to the eastern end of the bridge. The pilots are injured as the cockpit collapses, with Maj Howard briefly rendered unconscious. On coming around, Howard fears he has been hit so hard on the head he has gone blind. In actual fact, his steel helmet has been pushed down rather violently over his eyes.

Shoving the helmet back up and doing a forward roll out of the broken wreckage, Howard is glad to see his troops pulling themselves together and shaking off the shock of the landing. Even the two glider pilots seem to be coming back to life. Howard cannot suppress a smile of gratitude for their reckless precision. Wallwork asked back in England where the major thought it best to end up and cheerfully agreed to put the Horsa’s nose through the barbed wire, landing less than 50 yards from the bridge. In doing so, it removes another of Howard’s nagging anxieties – how to get his troops through the wire while under enemy fire. Firstly, the way through is open, and, secondly, the enemy, incredibly, seems oblivious to what is happening. There are no bullets flying about – just an eerie silence, broken now by the second glider landing right behind the first and then, sixty seconds later, by the third carrying out its own controlled crash.

Pte Edwards is among those ready to charge across the bridge, having survived the landing unharmed, and despite sitting in the glider’s 13th seat, right by the front door on the starboard side. The superstitious Army Air Corps (AAC) labelled his seat ‘12A’, but he takes a perverse pride in thumbing his nose at such things. ‘I always reckoned 13 was a lucky number, so I always used to sit in that seat,’ he recalls. Even so, ‘the whole [front of the] glider [was] stove right in, the woodwork completely blocked the doorway. We had to smash a hole through with our rifle butts to make a little hole to clamber out.’¹⁴

A few miles away, at around 12.18am, pathfinders of the 22nd Independent Parachute Company (Indep Para Coy) drop into Normandy. Their job is to mark the Landing Zones (LZ) and Drop Zones (DZ) for the rest of the 6th Airborne Division (Airborne Div), not least the 7th Bn, the Parachute Regiment (Regt).

It is due to arrive with the rest of the 5th Parachute Brigade (Para Bde) at 12.50am, with orders to link up with the Ox and Bucks at the two bridges. Once combined, they must hold off enemy attacks until Army commandos and assault troops of the 3rd Infantry Division (Div) – landing six miles away, on Sword Beach to breach Hitlers much-vaunted Atlantic Wall – can come to the rescue. The Airborne troops have to deny the use of the bridges to the enemy, for the Germans are expected to throw panzers and their own troops’ reinforcements into the fight on the beaches, in a bid to push the British back into the sea.

The Allies will need the same bridges to launch their own assault by armour and infantry against the city of Caen, which it is hoped will be taken by the end of D-Day.

The German sentries on the canal bridge are confused about what has made all the noise, thinking something has fallen off an Allied aircraft shot down on its way to bomb Caen. Eighteen-year-old Helmut Romer¹⁵, is still pondering what made ‘a swishing noise, followed by a bang’¹⁶ when a large dark shadow sweeps across the bridge, probably the third glider coming in to land.

On seeing soldiers clambering up the embankment and onto the road off the eastern end of the bridge, Romer is momentarily paralysed by fear. Armed to the teeth and with their faces blackened by camouflage paint, the intruders look terrifying. It is Lt Brotheridge who leads a charge of around two dozen screaming men across the canal bridge. Guns blazing, they are also hurling grenades with a lethal proficiency quite extraordinary for troops whose baptism of fire this is. Romer snaps out of it, fires a warning flare from a signal pistol into the air and yells: ‘Alarm!’

He and a Polish conscript along with a fellow German named Sauer, run as fast as they can in the opposite direction, back across the bridge, towards a café, throwing themselves into an elderberry bush.

Their confused Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) emerges from the pillbox where he has been slumbering, asking sleepily: ‘What’s wrong?’¹⁷

A burst of fire from Brotheridge’s Sten gun sends the German NCO to eternity. Other defenders are more alert and begin to fire on the attackers. Bren gunner Pte Bill Gray has already claimed one German soldier, firing the machine gun from the hip as he runs.

Ahead of him, L/Cpl Tom Packwood – the soldier assigned as his number two, meant to hand him ammo magazines – steps aside and shouts:

‘Come on Bill, you are supposed to be in front of me!’¹⁸

Gray keeps running and firing, felling another German on the other side of the bridge. Busting for a pee – though it is obviously unwise to pause for a toilet break right now – he smashes in the door of a barn he has been assigned to clear. Gray hurls in a grenade, fires a burst from the Bren, just to make sure of eliminating any enemy in there. It turns out to be devoid of enemy troops.

Lt Brotheridge has been hit in the neck by a bullet, tumbling to the ground by the café – a look of total surprise on his face.¹⁹ Within two hours he will die of his wounds, a grievous loss to the Ox and Bucks. He was a very popular officer and they had lived with him and trained for war together for years. Now he has been cut down within minutes of going into action, possibly the first Allied soldier to die in combat on D-Day.

The only other death in the early moments of the action has been a private in the third glider, which veered into a pond to avoid crashing into the other Horsas and broke apart. The unfortunate soldier was trapped in wreckage and drowned.

The remaining Germans on the canal bridge do not put up much of a fight and either flee or die. Romer, Sauer, and the Pole stay undercover in their elderberry bush for the next 26 hours before being compelled by thirst and hunger to emerge with their hands up.

Sheltering in their cellar are Georges and Therese Gondree, who run the café. They have been the source of much intelligence on the local situation, which has been sent back to England via the Resistance. It is amazing what can be gleaned from the overheard conversations of German soldiers drunk on the café’s unsophisticated Calvados brandy.

On this night the Gondrees and their two young daughters ignore the tremendous crashes on the other side of the bridge, also thinking it is associated with the bombing raid. They finally realise something unusual is going on when gunfire and explosions erupt on their side of the bridge.

Georges crawls on his hands and knees up to the first floor of the café building and peeps out a window. He can hear talking but cannot tell who might be responsible. His eyes grow more accustomed to the dark and he picks out a couple of soldiers sitting near the café’s petrol pump. Beside them is a corpse.

Going outside to investigate, M Gondree is asked in French by one of the mystery soldiers: ‘Are you a civilian?’²⁰

Unable to tell if the inquisitor is German or British, Georges confirms in French that he is. The exchange appears to have exhausted the soldier’s French vocabulary, so M Gondree returns to his cellar and decides to wait until after dawn to investigate further who is doing what to whom.

Not far away to the east, the Orne River bridge is taken without a fight, which is just as well, for the third glider assigned to the task has mistakenly landed by another bridge, over the Dives River, some eight miles away.

Its troops seize it anyway but then retreat under fire on realising their error, losing a few men while disengaging. At the Caen Canal and Orne River bridges, the sappers of the Royal Engineers (RE) discover the explosives have not even been placed to blow them up.

It is 12.31am.

Maj Howard goes to see how the glider pilots are getting on with off-loading equipment from the wreckage of their aircraft, finding SSgt Wallwork on his feet again and hard at work. Howard thinks the pilot has unusual war paint on his face – everybody else’s is matte black, but Wallwork’s has a sticky gleam to it, a different shade altogether. He realises the glider pilot’s face is covered in blood from where he has been cut by Perspex shards and wood splinters.

Another air armada of transport aircraft sweeps over the Channel – the seas below by now crowded with thousands of invasion vessels carrying tens of thousands of troops.

Soldiers on the upper decks and sailors on watch aboard the ships gaze in awe at hundreds of twinkling navigation lights on the wingtips of the aircraft, their fleeting silhouettes revealed against a half moon sky. It is a staggering display of aerial supremacy. Along with the massive invasion fleet, the Allies hope it heralds the beginning of the end for the Nazi cause.

Maj Howard is mightily relieved at 12.50am to hear the roar of aircraft dropping the 3rd and 5th Parachute brigades. Thousands of parachutes blossom in the sky above over Normandy. However, it is all somewhat chaotic – partly caused by winds blowing paratroopers off course, while some drops are in the wrong location, miles away from their correct DZs. It will take some time to gather 7th Para Bn together and head for the bridges.

While it is needed over there, its sister 9th Para Bn is assigned to crack a tough nut: the Merville Battery. Those troops must destroy heavy guns that can fire on Sword Beach and potentially sink landing ships packed with troops and equipment as they come in to be offloaded. There are also five bridges over the Dives River, which are to be destroyed by troops of the 3rd Para Bde, including the 1st Canadian Para Bn, in order to cut enemy lines of attack from the east.

The sooner the 7th Bn arrives at Benouville the better, for Howard is acutely aware that his lightly armed force will be no match for panzers, with only a single working Projector Infantry Anti-Tank (PIAT) weapon. This uses a large spring to punch a spigot into the base of a dart-like armour-piercing bomb and trigger its propellant. It has a limited, flat trajectory range of just 115 yards. The British troops’ rifles and machine guns will not be much use against armour either.

Maj Howard is at least finally able to order his radio operator at the company command post, by the pillbox, to transmit the agreed message for successful seizure of both bridges – ‘Ham’ for the canal bridge and ‘Jam’ for the river bridge. ‘Ham and Jam… Ham and Jam,’ L/Cpl Tappenden says repeatedly into the microphone.

This rapidly becomes wearisome when nobody on the 5th Para Bde command net acknowledges it. Exasperated, L/Cpl Tappenden growls: ‘Ham and bloody Jam! Why the hell don’t you answer!?’²¹

Unfortunately, the brigade’s radio equipment has been lost during the drop, but Brigadier (Brig) Nigel Poett, commander of the 5th Para Bde, and a couple of paratroopers soon arrive, which is not quite the level of reinforcements expected.

Not long before 1.00am a German staff car, accompanied by a motorcycle outrider, races down the road from Ranville. They run into a hail of bullets, the motorcyclist losing control, and both he and the machine plunge into the river. The staff car hurtles drunkenly over the Orne bridge, its tyres punctured and coming to an inglorious end in a ditch. Three occupants climb out, with two killed, the third shot in the leg.

The survivor is Maj Hans Schmidt who is supposed to be in command of defending the bridges. As Captain (Capt) John ‘Doc’ Vaughan, the Ox and Bucks medical officer on the scene, tends to his wounds, Schmidt’s mood turns defiantly ugly. He shouts in English about the sheer stupidity of the Allies thinking they can actually beat Germany.

Schmidt storms: ‘You are going to be thrown back into the sea!’²²

Then he lapses into moroseness, asking ‘Doc’ to shoot him, for he has lost his honour along with the bridges, and the Führer will be very upset with him. Vaughan refuses to oblige and instead ‘shoots’ him with a large dose of morphine. Schmidt is thereafter very relaxed and full of gratitude for the excellent medical attention he is receiving.

The British soldiers are amused and intrigued to find Schmidt’s staff car full of empty wine bottles, dirty dinner plates, and wine glasses along with ladies’ cosmetics and items of lingerie – but no female passengers.²³

Maj Howard remarks it appears his troops’ sudden arrival out of nowhere ‘resulted in Herr Commandant being interrupted during a most intimate soiree with an obliging local lady in Ranville.’²⁴

The good humour prompted by this somewhat farcical enemy intrusion is dispelled when, at 1.30am, three enemy tanks, with troops trotting alongside them, clank down the road from Le Port on a foray towards the western end of the Caen Canal bridge.

Sergeant (Sgt) ‘Wagger’ Thornton waits until the leading panzer is almost on top of him before firing the unit’s PIAT, which nobody has much faith in stopping an enemy tank. On this occasion, it does the trick. Pte Edwards witnesses how ‘this flaming tank literally blew up, exploded … there were great spurts of green and orange and yellow as all the ammunition inside was exploding, making a hell of a din.’²⁵

More British troops open fire, forcing the German infantry to retreat while the tank’s crew are incinerated, except for one poor panzerman hurled out onto the ground, mortally wounded.

His cries and moans of agony upset the British soldiers, with one officer suggesting to another the German ought to be put out of his misery. Nobody has the nerve to do so, and it is clear the medics cannot save him, so he is left to die – such is the cruelty of war.

The two other panzers halt, turn around, and, along with the troops, withdraw, leaving behind the burning tank’s wreckage blocking a crossroads and hence both approach roads. If only the Germans knew how poorly equipped the Airborne soldiers are for the job of seeing off panzers, they might press their attack with more vigour and manage to endanger the eastern flank of the invasion. Paratroopers of the 7th Bn, seeing and hearing the explosions of the ammunition cooking off inside the blazing tank, use it as a means to navigate across country to the scene of battle.

Their arrival causes a bit of rejoicing’,²⁶ an Ox and Bucks soldier calling out to them: ‘Where the hell have you been!?’

The paratroopers pat the Ox and Bucks soldiers on their helmets, saying ‘good lads, well done’