Private James Mutch
Unit : "C" Company, 7th (Galloway) Battalion The King's Own Scottish Borderers
MY FIRST NINE DAYS IN ACTION - BY JAMES MUTCH C Coy 7th KOSB
It is only since the film 'A Bridge Too Far' was made (I received an invitation to attend the premier showing in Scotland) that I started to bring it back to mind - my son started to buy all sorts of books he could find about the Arnhem landing.
I will try now to give a description of what happened and how I felt during the first few days.
We landed on the Sunday - it was a very good landing - and took up our positions just to the north of the railway about 100 yards beyond the trees and we had a very quiet night. in fact up to the Monday morning. It just reminded me of an exercise, back in Britain, except for the noise of rifle and gunfire from Arnhem and the terrible screaming of women coming from the Wolfheze direction. We had heard so many stories of the Germans torturing people that we thought that was what was happening. But I have heard since that it was the patients that had escaped from the asylum near the railway crossing that were making the noise.
Up to that time even though I had been in the army since May 1940 I had never been in action except bombing raids in Britain. I was in the Royal Artillery from 1940 - 1943, most of the time on coastal defence, on an island on the Firth of Forth (Inchcolm Island) defending the naval dockyards at Rosyth and then when all danger of an invasion of Britain disappeared, I was drafted into the Royal Scots Regiment to do infantry training. When I passed I was moved into the 7th K.O.S.B. at Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire.
On the Monday I got my first taste of battle. It seems that D Company which were on our right, had landed in some sort of trouble and the platoon I was in was sent to find out what had happened to them. We went through the wood to our right until we came to rough open ground and we lay down a couple of yards from the edge. We could see soldiers running across an opening in a bank or wall, about 300 - 400 yards across from us. They looked like Germans but every time we fired at them, they waved a celanese triangle: that was a yellow triangle of nylon which we carried inside the front of our airborne smocks which were to be used to signal to our own planes when they came over to drop supplies.
I was lying close to a young tree - its trunk was only about three to four inches thick when all of a sudden it toppled on top of me. For a minute I could not understand what had happened. And then I saw that it had been chewed up by machine gun bullets, just in line with my face. I quickly rolled away from that position and then my companions asked what had happened. When I told them they all started laughing. I didn't at that time; I think it was a laughing matter but looking back I think it must have been nervous laughter.
Minutes after that we were ordered to clear the wood to our right, as there seemed to be enemy troops in it. But they were not in the wood - but lying in the rough open ground of the open area. My mate and I were the first to notice them as we were about ten yards in the wood. The first one we saw was a machine gunner: he was lying about ten yards out, lying at right angles to the wood covering the whole edge of the wood. He saw us at the same time and immediately started to scramble round to engage us, but he never made it. I had often wondered how I would feel when this happened. Looking back I don't think I felt any emotion - only pleased that I had been first. And of course there was still more of the enemy to watch out for.
During this time others had seemingly infiltrated into our rear, so we were told to split up and commence guerilla warfare. Four of us started out through the woods in the direction of Arnhem. After about a mile we came to a more mature wood with the trees a fair distance apart and about a hundred yards wide - and very open with a drop on the right side of about two feet to a fire break. And beyond it a young dense wood - the trees about fifteen feet high. We heard German voices so we immediately lay down trying to hide behind any fallen branches we could find. When five Germans came along the fire break in single file, thirty yards in front of us. Four of them passed and never looked our way, but the fifth one saw us and shouted to his friends. We immediately opened fire and they all dropped behind the drop in the ground. We waited a few minutes, in case any more were around, and then crept forward: one was dead, two were injured, but the other two must have crept off into the young trees. We made a short search for them, but found nothing. We returned to the two injured and dressed their wounds. They were surprised at this, because by the look on their faces they thought we had returned to shoot them. We decided to leave them there and move on in case their friends came back with reinforcements.
Soon after that we met one of our jeeps out on patrol and returned us to our unit at the railway.
My impression of battle up to this time was: I didn't fancy it but it was better than being in the air raid; at least I could now hit back, although this was not always possible during some of the later engagements, owing to the shortage of ammunition.
That night we tried to advance along the north of the railway, but got held up. The next day we went to a farm, I believe it was called Johanna-hoeve, to help the Poles land, at one o'clock. At that time fighter aircraft came overhead. Thinking they were part of the escort bringing in the Poles, we dashed out to the open to show our celanese triangles - and of course they were German fighters and they machine-gunned us, but there were no casualties. It turned out the Poles were not arriving till about four o'clock.
The next action was at the 'White House', which I visited on my holiday. It has changed very little in the last forty years. I was able to point out where my slit-trench was in the wood. From there I went to a house somewhere between Oosterbeek and Wolfheze. There were no houses across the street from the one I was in just a few trees. But during the afternoon I and about four others were taken across back gardens to the east to a street where the paras were having a sticky time, to help them. I was still there when the withdrawal took place, on the Monday night.
I will give a short description of what happened that night. During the previous few days we had been driven out of a few of the houses - always moving next door when things got too hot, so that nobody knew where anyone was. So that, maybe, explains what happened to me when the time for the pull out took place. Early on the Monday evening an Officer came to the house and said that we would be withdrawing later that evening and that we had to wrap up our feet and any metal parts that were likely to make a noise on our way out and that someone would come back and tell us when to go. I and another chap (I have no idea which unit he belonged to) went back upstairs to our posts, the rest staying downstairs. Everything was very quiet in the house so not to let the enemy know we were there. We waited and waited, but the signal to move out never came, so one of us went downstairs. I can't remember which of us that went, but it turned out no one was there: they had pulled out and forgot us upstairs. I don't really blame anyone for this, as we were all really exhausted by this time. We then decided to go back to the house I had been with the K.O.S.B. in the hope they had not pulled out. But when we arrived, they were gone, so we decided to try to make for the river on our own. But we had only a slight idea which way to go. We set off moving along a street, roughly at right angles to the railway, as we knew the river lay in that direction, and that if we were challenged we could always dash into one of the houses.
It was a very wet and dark night. I have no idea which street we walked along, the only landmark I can remember was a hospital on the left side and that a short distance along there was a wood on our right. We decided to hide there until daybreak and then get our bearings. We just got a few feet into the wood when we were challenged: we had almost stepped into an enemy slit-trench. We had no option but surrender, as we could hear others close by. After a great deal of shouting among them, two were detailed to take us away. They took us down the road we had previously been going - then through a gap in a hedge on the left into a wood. It was now our turn to think we were going to be disposed of, but no - as there was a path to a large house. We were kept there till morning when two older soldiers took us somewhere in Arnhem to be interrogated. There was one interesting thing happened on the way there: as neither I nor my friend could speak a word of German and they couldn't speak any English we tried sign language to say we wanted a cigarette, as we had not had a smoke for days. But they had no cigarettes. Further along we met another German soldier and one of our guards asked him for one. He gave him two and further down the street he broke one of the cigarettes in two and gave us a half each. That was about the only good deed a German soldier did me all the time I was a prisoner of war.