GC8BWQC MARKET GARDEN/ARNHEM, Sunday 17th Sept 1944 (Traditional Cache) in South East England, United Kingdom created by Ridder Tiuri

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GC8BWQC ▼

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Hidden : 8/31/2019

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The 1st Airborne Division landed at 13:30 without serious incident but problems associated with the poor plan began soon after.

LZ-Z

Only half of the Division arrived with the first lift and only half of these (1st Parachute Brigade) could advance on the bridge.
The remaining troops had to defend the drop zones overnight for the arrival of the second lift on the following day.

DZ-X, LZ-X

Thus the Division's primary objective had to be tackled by less than half a brigade. While the paratroopers marched eastwards to Arnhem, the Reconnaissance Squadron was to race to the bridge in their jeeps and hold it until the rest of the Brigade arrived. The unit set off to the bridge late and having traveled only a short distance the vanguard was halted by a strong German defensive position; the squadron could make no further progress.

This had grave consequences. Five hours after the initial landing, feeling that the British were tied down in Arnhem, the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 9th SS Panzer Division was able to cross the Arnhem bridge and drive to Nijmegen and the bridge over the Waal branch of the Rhine. No British airborne unit was at the bridge.

Arnhem veteran Tom Hicks of 1st Parachute Squadron of the Royal Engineers described the problems the paratroops faced: "They (the Germans) had guns that out-ranged ours. We had no artillery with us so they could just lay off and pick you off kind of thing. If we wanted to get a gun out of action we had to send a patrol out, do it man to man kind of thing."

Two of the three battalions of the 1st Parachute Brigade were slowed down by small German units of a training battalion which had quickly established a thin blocking line covering the obvious routes into Arnhem.
Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost's 2nd Parachute Battalion, advancing eastwards along the southernmost road into Arnhem near the Rhine, found its route largely undefended.

John Frost

They arrived at the bridge in the evening and set up defensive positions at the north end. They were joined by Brigade HQ, led by Major Tony Hibbert, which was the brigade's only other unit to reach the bridge.

Two attempts to capture the arched steel bridge and its southern approach failed.
Of the other battalions, the 3rd Parachute Battalion had only covered half the distance to the bridge when they halted for the night, the rear of their column being under attack and needing time to catch up.
The 1st Parachute Battalion was similarly fragmented, yet pushed on around the flank of the German line throughout the night. Frequent skirmishes resulted in their making little more progress.
The 3rd Battalion under Captain James Cleminson, KBE, MC, ambushed a German staff car and killed the commander of Arnhem's garrison, Major-General Friedrich Kussin, as well as his aide and his driver.

General Kusin

Communication breakdown

Some loss of communication between the bridge and divisional headquarters in one of the drop zones was expected, because 13 km (8.1 mi) separated them and the main radio was the Type 22 set, with an effective range of 5 km (3.1 mi).
The British radios did not function at any range; some had difficulty receiving signals from just a few hundred metres and others received nothing at all.
It was found after landing that the radios had been set to different frequencies, two of which coincided with German and British public broadcasting stations.
Other theories have been advanced to explain the greatly reduced range of the 1st Airborne Division radio sets. Thus communication between 1st Airborne units was poor while German defence were being coordinated and reinforced.

The only means of calling for air support was through two special American units dropped with the 1st Airborne Division. These units were equipped with "Veeps": jeeps having Very High Frequency SCR-193 crystal sets. It was found impossible to communicate with aircraft on the higher of two frequencies for this and the sets could not be tuned to the lower frequency.
Despite efforts to re-tune them, one set was soon destroyed by mortar fire and the other abandoned the next day, cutting the only possible link with RAF fighter-bombers. The pilots were under orders not to attack on their own initiative, since from the air there was no easy way to distinguish friend from foe; together with poor weather, this led to a lack of air support.
After the war it was found that the Royal Corps of Signals was either unaware or failed to tell divisional signals of the communication problems identified in November 1943 due to sun spots by the Scientific Advisor's Office to the 21st Army Group.
Urquhart ordered the 4-metre (13 ft) aerials to be used, which were useless due to the physics of radio propagation. The wrong frequencies were part of the same problem due to signals personnel not knowing the science of radio communications.

On the German side, it was soon clear what was happening. Field Marshal Walter Model was staying at the Tafelberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, a village to the west of Arnhem, when the British began to land in the countryside to the west of Oosterbeek.

Fieldmarshall Model

He rapidly deduced the likely focus of the attack and after evacuating his headquarters, organized a defense. Wilhelm Bittrich, commanding the II SS Panzer Corps, sent a reconnaissance company of the 9th SS Panzer Division to Nijmegen to reinforce the bridge defenses. By midnight, Model had gained a clear picture of the situation and had organized the defense of Arnhem. The confusion usually caused by airborne operations was absent at Arnhem and the advantage of surprise was lost. During the operation, the Germans recovered a copy of the Market-Garden plan from the body of an American officer, who should not have carried it into combat.