Bridge Too Far (67 page)

Urquhart, Warrack recalls, “seemed resigned.”  He agreed to the plan.  But under no circumstances, he warned Warrack, “must the enemy be allowed to think that this was the beginning of a crack in the formation’s position.”  Warrack was to make clear to the Germans that the step was being taken solely on humane grounds.  Negotiations could take place, Urquhart said, “on condition that the Germans understand you are a doctor representing your patients, not an official emissary from the division.”  Warrack was permitted to ask for a truce period during the afternoon so that the battlefield could be cleared of wounded before “both sides got on with the fight.”

Warrack hurried off to find Lieutenant Commander Arnnoldus Wolters, the Dutch liaison officer, and Dr.  Gerritt van Maanen, both of whom he asked to help in the negotiations.  Because Wolters, who would act as interpreter, was in the Dutch military and “might run a great risk going to a German headquarters,” Warrack gave him the pseudonym “Johnson.”  The three men quickly headed for the Schoonoord Hotel to contact the German division medical officer.

By coincidence, that officer, twenty-nine-year-old Major Egon Skalka,

claims he had reached the same conclusion as Warrack.  As Skalka

recalls that Sunday morning, he felt “something had to be done not only

for our wounded but the British in der Hexenkessel.  In the Schoonoord

Hotel “casualties lay everywhere—even on the floor.”  According to

Skalka, he had come to see “the British chief medical officer to

suggest a battlefield clearing” before

Warrack arrived.  Whoever first had the idea, they did meet.  Warrack’s impression of the young German doctor was that “he was effeminate in appearance, but sympathetic and apparently quite anxious to ingratiate himself with the British—just in case.”  Confronting the slender, dapper officer, handsome in his finely cut uniform, Warrack, with “Johnson” interpreting, made his proposal.  As they talked, Skalka studied Warrack, “a tall, lanky, dark-haired fellow, phlegmatic like all Englishmen.  He seemed terribly tired but otherwise not in bad shape.”  Skalka was prepared to agree to the evacuation plan, but, he told Warrack, “first we will have to go to my headquarters to make sure there are no objections from my General.”  Skalka refused to take Dr.  van Maanen with them.  In a captured British jeep, Skalka, Warrack and “Johnson” set out for Arnhem with Skalka driving.  Skalka recalls that he “drove very fast, zigzagging back and forth.  I did not want Warrack to orient himself and he would have had a tough time of it the way I drove.  We went very fast, part of the time under fire, and twisted and turned into the city.”

To Wolters, the short drive into Arnhem was “sad and miserable.” Wreckage lay everywhere.  Houses were still smoking or in ruins.  Some of the roads they followed, chewed up by tank tracks and cratered by shellfire, “looked like plowed fields.”  Wrecked guns, overturned jeeps, charred armored vehicles and “the crumpled bodies of the dead” lay like a trail all the way into Arnhem.  Skalka had not blindfolded the two men, nor did Wolters feel he made any attempt to conceal the route he took.  It struck him that the elegant SS medical officer seemed “eager for us to see the German strength.”  Through the still-smoking, debris-strewn streets of Arnhem, Skalka drove northeast and pulled up outside Lieutenant Colonel Harzer’s headquarters, the high school on Hezelbergherweg.

Although the arrival of Warrack and Wolters created surprise among the staff officers, Harzer, alerted by phone, was waiting for them.

Skalka, leaving the two officers in an outer room, reported to his

commander.  Harzer was angry.  “I was amazed,” he says, “that Skalka

had not blindfolded them.  Now they knew the exact

location of my headquarters.”  Skalka had laughed.  “The way I drove I would be very surprised if they could find their way anywhere,” he assured Harzer.

The two Germans sat down with the British emissaries.  “The medical officer proposed that his British wounded be evacuated from the perimeter since they no longer had the room or supplies to care for them,” Harzer says.  “It meant calling a truce for a couple of hours.  I told him I was sorry our countries were fighting.  Why should we fight, after all?  I agreed to his proposal.”

Wolters—“a Canadian soldier named Johnson,” as Warrack introduced him—remembers the conference in a completely different context.  “At first the German SS colonel refused to even consider a truce,” he says.  “There were several other staff officers in the room, including the acting chief of staff, Captain Schwarz, who finally turned to Harzer and said that the whole matter would have to be taken up with the General.”  The Germans left the room.  “As we waited,” Wolters says, “we were offered sandwiches and brandy.  Warrack warned me not to drink on an empty stomach.  Whatever kind of filling was in the sandwiches was covered with sliced onions.”

As the Germans reentered the room, “everyone snapped to attention and there was much “Heil Hitlering.”” General Bittrich, hatless, in his long black leather coat, came in.  “He stayed only a moment,” Wolters remembers.  Studying the two men, Bittrich said, “Ich bedauere sehr diesen Krieg zwischen unseren Vaterl@andern” (i regret this war between our two nations).  The General listened quietly to Warrack’s evacuation plan and gave his consent.  “I agreed,” Bittrich says, “because a man cannot—provided, of course, that he has such feelings to start with—lose all humanity, even during the most bitter fight.”  Then Bittrich handed Warrack a bottle of brandy.  “This is for your General,” he told Warrack, and he withdrew.

By 10:30 A.m. Sunday, agreement on the partial truce was reached,

although Wolters recollects “that the Germans seemed worried.  Both the

Tafelberg and the Schoonoord hotels were sitting on the front lines and

the Germans could not guarantee to

stop mortaring and shelling.”  Harzer was mainly concerned about the long-range shelling of the British south of the Rhine and whether it could be controlled during the casualty evacuation.  Skalka says that after assurances had been given on this point, he received a radio message from British Second Army headquarters.  “It was simply addressed to the medical officer, 9th SS Panzer Division, thanking me and asking if a cease-fire could extend long enough for the British to bring up medical supplies, drugs and bandages from across the Rhine.” Skalka radioed back, “We do not need your help but request only that your air force refrain from bombing our Red Cross trucks continually.” He was answered immediately: “Unfortunately, such attacks occur on both sides.”  Skalka thought the message “ridiculous.”  Angrily he replied, “Sorry, but I have not seen our air force in two years.”  Back came the British message: “Just stick to the agreement.”  Skalka was now enraged, so much so, he claims, that he radioed back, “Lick my –-“ * * Skalka’s account that some exchange of messages took place is probably true.  Yet the wording of the messages is certainly questionable, especially his answer regarding the Luftwaffe, which was in the air during the week, harassing the British drops.  Further, it is a belittlement of forces of his own country.  Such a contemptuous assessment of one’s own side to an enemy was certainly uncommon among the SS.

The arrangement, as finally worked out, called for a two-hour truce beginning at 3 P.m. The wounded would leave the perimeter by a designated route near the Tafelberg Hotel.  Every effort was to be made “to slacken fire or stop completely.”  Troops on both sides holding front-line positions were warned to hold their fire.  As Skalka began to order “every available ambulance and jeep to assemble behind the front lines,” Warrack and Wolters, about to head back to their own lines, were allowed to fill their pockets with morphia and medical supplies.  Wolters “was glad to get out of there, especially from the moment Schwarz said to me, “You don’t speak German like a Britisher.””

En route back to the perimeter, a Red Cross flag flying from their jeep

and escorted by another German medical officer, Warrack and Wolters

were permitted to stop at St.  Elisabeth’s Hospi-

tal to inspect conditions and visit the British wounded—among them Brigadier Lathbury, who, with badges of rank removed, was now “Lance Corporal” Lathbury.  They were greeted by the chief British medical officer, Captain Lipmann Kessel; the head of the surgical team, Major Cedric Longland; and the senior Dutch surgeon, Dr.  van Hengel—all of whom, Warrack remembers, “were desperately anxious for news.”  Heavy fighting had taken place about the hospital.  At one point there had even been a pitched battle in the building with Germans firing over the heads of patients in the wards, Kessel reported.  But since Thursday the area had been quiet and Warrack discovered that, in contrast to the harrowing ordeal of the wounded in the perimeter, in St.  Elisabeth’s “British casualties were in beds with blankets and sheets, and well cared for by Dutch nuns and doctors.”  Warning Kessel to be prepared for a heavy flow of casualties, the two men returned to Oosterbeek, just in time, Warrack recalls, “to step into a packet of mortaring near the Tafelberg.”

At 3 P.m. the partial truce began.  The firing suddenly diminished and then stopped altogether.  Lance Bombardier Percy Parkes, for whom the “overwhelming noise had become normal, found the silence so unreal that for a second I thought I was dead.”  With British and German medical officers and orderlies supervising the moves, ambulances and jeeps from both sides began loading casualties.  Sergeant Dudley R. Pearson, the 4th Parachute Brigade’s chief clerk, was put beside his Brigadier’s stretcher on a jeep.  “So you got it too, Pearson,” said Hackett.  Pearson was wearing only his boots and trousers.  His right shoulder was heavily bandaged “where shrapnel had torn a huge hole.”  Hackett was gray-faced and obviously in great pain from his stomach wound.  As they moved off toward Arnhem, Hackett said, “Pearson, I hope you won’t think I’m pulling rank, but I think I’m a bit worse off than you are.  At the hospital do you mind if they get to me first?”  * * Both Lathbury and Hackett became “lance corporals” in the hospital.  Sergeant Dave Morris, who gave blood to Hackett before his operation, was cautioned that the Brigadier’s identity was not to be revealed, Lathbury, in the hospital since the nineteenth, got his first news of the division when the Oosterbeek wounded arrived—including the information that Urquhart had been able to rejoin the division and that Frost’s men had held the Arnhem bridge for almost four days.  Both brigadiers later escaped from the hospital with the help of the Dutch and hid out.  Lathbury eventually joined the irrepressible Major Digby Tatham-Warter, who, dressed in civilian clothes and working with the Dutch underground, “went about quite openly and on one occasion helped to push a German staff car out of a ditch.”  With a group of approximately 120 troopers, medics and pilots who had been hidden by the Dutch, and led by a Dutch guide, Lathbury reached American troops south of the Rhine on the evening of October 22.  The incredible Tatham-Warter helped about 150 British soldiers to escape.  Incidentally, it took the author seven years to discover his whereabouts—then by accident.  My British publisher met him in Kenya where he has been living since the end of the war.  Tatham-Warter says that he “carried the umbrella in battle more for identification purposes than for anything else, because I was always forgetting the password.”

Lieutenant Pat Glover, who had jumped with Myrtle the “parachick,” was moved to St.  Elisabeth’s in agony.  A bullet had severed two veins in his right hand and on the way to the Schoonoord dressing station he was hit again by shrapnel in the right calf.  There was so little morphia that he was told he could not be given a shot unless he deemed it absolutely necessary.  Glover did not ask for any.  Now, sleeping fitfully, he found himself thinking of Myrtle.  He could not remember what day she had been killed.  During the fighting he and his batman, Private Joe Scott, had traded Myrtle’s satchel back and forth.  Then, in a slit trench under fire, Glover suddenly realized that Myrtle’s bag was not there.  “Where’s Myrtle?”  he had yelled to Scott.  “She’s up there, sir.”  Scott pointed to the top of Glover’s trench.  Inside her bag, Myrtle lay on her back, feet in the air.  During the night Glover and Scott buried the chicken in a shallow little grave near a hedge.  As Scott brushed earth over the spot, he looked at Glover and said, “Well, Myrtle was game to the last, sir.”  Glover remembered he had not taken off Myrtle’s parachute wings.  Now, in a haze of pain, he was glad that he had buried her with honor and properly—with her badge of rank—as befitted those who died in action.

At the Schoonoord, Hendrika van der Vlist watched as German orderlies

began to move casualties out.  Suddenly firing began.  One of the

Germans yelled, “If it does not stop we will open fire and not a

casualty, a doctor or a nurse will come out alive.”  Hendrika paid no

attention.  “It is always the youngest soldiers

who yell the loudest,” she noted, “and we’re used to the German threats by now.”  The firing ceased and the loading continued.

Several times again firing broke out as the long lines of walking wounded and convoys of jeeps, ambulances and trucks moved out toward Arnhem.  “Inevitably,” General Urquhart recalled, “there were misunderstandings.  It is not easy to still a battle temporarily.” Doctors at the Tafelberg had “some uneasy moments as they cleared combative Germans off the premises.”  And nearly everyone remembers that the recently arrived Poles could not understand the necessity for the partial cease-fire.  “They had many old scores to settle,” says Urquhart, “and saw no legitimate reason for holding their fire.” Ultimately, they were “prevailed upon to curb their eagerness until the evacuation was completed.”

Major Skalka, along with Dr.  Warrack, kept the convoys moving throughout the afternoon.  Some 200 walking wounded were led out and more than 250 men were carried in the medical convoys.  “I have never seen anything like the conditions at Oosterbeek,” Skalka says.  “It was nothing but death and wreckage.”

At St.  Elisabeth’s, Lieutenant Peter Stainforth, recovering from a chest wound received in Arnhem, heard the first walking wounded coming in.  “I felt a shiver of excitement run up my spine,” he says.  “I have never been so proud.  They came in and the rest of us were horror-stricken.  Every man had a week’s growth of beard.  Their battle dress was torn and stained; and filthy, blood-soaked bandages poked out from all of them.  The most compelling thing was their eyes—red-rimmed, deep-sunk, peering out from drawn, mud-caked faces made haggard by lack of sleep, and yet they walked in undefeated.  They looked fierce enough to take over the place right then and there.”