Other sappers, mainly from A Troop, went to a building north of the school, but a German attack convinced Captain Eric Mackay, the commander of A Troop, that the building was too vulnerable, so he ordered his men to pull back to the schoolhouse and join the engineers from B Troop. At first, the new arrivals were not welcomed. Sapper George Needham remembered that when they entered the school they were told by one of the B Troop sappers to “Bugger off and go find your own place.” Eventually everyone was accommodated, and all hands set to work fortifying the empty rooms.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in World War II magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Although everything had not gone according to plan, by the evening of the 17th, nearly 800 men from Frost’s 2nd Battalion, along with bits and pieces of other units, were in position on the north end of the bridge. All they had to do now was hold on for three days until the tanks of XXX Corps arrived to relieve them.

The 60 men from the Royal Engineers and C Company who were gathered at the schoolhouse spent the rest of the evening preparing the building for defense. This included filling as many containers as possible with water. Four toilets were found in the basement, together with a tap. Three of the commodes were placed out of bounds so they could be used for drinking purposes, while the fourth was reserved for calls of nature.

Padfield remembered: “We used desks and cupboards to make barricades. We had the advantage of fires around the place to see what we were doing, and then we settled down to wait. I positioned myself on the stairway so that I was available for any occurrence. I sent Arthur Hendy to have a scout around the basement to see if there was anything of use in the way of clothing that we could use to muffle the sound of our boots, and just as important to see if there was any food. Our luck was in as he came up with pullovers, slips and skirts, obviously a girls’ school. We passed them round and he cleared off again as he said ‘There were some vegetables down there.’ After a while he came back with some hot soup, which went down very well. Daylight came and I went round and sorted out the arcs of fire I wanted each man to cover. I went to Sid Gueran and set him up on a desk so that he could comfortably sit and cover a vital area to the west through his porthole window. I was telling him the area I wanted him to cover and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting a response. When I turned towards him, he was sat upright, and my first loss. He had been shot through the mouth. It must have been a stray bullet because I certainly didn’t hear anything. I got hold of Joe Malley, whom I had put in charge of this particular area, and we laid him out on the floor and made sure that his identity tag was round his neck.”

Although Frost was able to prepare a perimeter defense, he was isolated from the main body of the division, which was located about three miles from the bridge and busy fighting its own battle. The lightly armed British paratroopers had run into two SS armored divisions that had reacted quickly to the landing and were now trying to crush the northernmost airborne bridgehead. There had been intermittent opposition throughout the evening in Arnhem, but the first concerted German attempt to destroy Frost’s position at the bridge came at about 8:30 the next morning, when a mixed force of armored cars and halftracks from the 9th SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, commanded by SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Viktor Gräbner, raced toward the north end of the bridge. It is not known if Gräbner, barreling down the road from Nijmegen, intended his column to mount an attack or if he was just trying to dash through the British positions to reach his divisional headquarters.

The men in the schoolhouse had a good view of the vehicles as they approached. Two or three were allowed through before the order was given to open fire. Sapper Ronald Emery from A Troop was one of those who immediately opened on the Germans. He shot the driver and co-driver of a halftrack, which crashed into the schoolhouse not 10 yards from where Emery was positioned. Disregarding the hail of machine gun fire coming from the vehicle, the sapper stood up in full view of the Germans and threw a grenade that killed the crew and silenced the gun. He then went on to assist in the destruction of five other vehicles. When the fusillade finally stopped two hours later, 12 German vehicles were destroyed and approximately 70 SS troops were dead, among them Gräbner.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to