AN ACCOUNT OF THE ATTACK ON GROIN BY 5TH SEAFORTH
'The bullets were going through the grass a foot above our heads. We heard a bren firing, and then a sten, and we heard them shouting: "Give up, you bastards! The Seaforths are here!" That must have been when they charged. There were a few bursts of spandau, and then silence.
'We knew what that meant. They were our mates, and we were all boiled up. "To hell with this," I said. "Come on."
'We ran over the bridge, and into the ditch again, then across the road to the cover of a house, and then round to the Boche side. Purchase was lying about twenty yards from the trench, and Gray was almost inside it. There wasn't a scrap of cover for the last forty yards. The two of them had gone at it baldheaded, and there were three spandaus and forty-six men in the trench. Of course they were hit. They were hit all over. But they'd made the Boche look their way, and 16 Platoon had been able to get into the big house while the panic was on.
'We were mad when we saw them lying there. We didn't know what we were doing. We stood in the open, not even shooting, and called the Boche for all the names in creation, and yelled at them to come out. And so help me, they did. A wee white flag came over the edge, and then an officer, and then two or three, and then the whole issue. Forty-six of them. The officer was one of those right clever baskets - big smiles all over his face ....
'Purchase was the best section leader ever we had.'
He died. Gray, though he had a burst clean through him, lived to receive the Distinguished Conduct Medal and survive the war. His bren was found actually inside the German trench.
It was now daylight, and Hugh Robertson's houses at (3) were still holding out; but Bill Flynn and 18 platoon went in, hit them hard, and cleared them in half an hour. In the cellars they found Peter Stone?s wounded, and a number of Germans. The whole village was cleared by 0730.
There was a short breathing-space while the companies dug in; but their still remained Hollands Hof, and the farm at (6), which in the original plan had allotted to "D" Company and had been shelved temporarily while the fighting described on the previous few pages had been taking place. In it the Para- boys, obstinate as ever, still lingered.
The Brigadier gave Colonel Sym a free hand to take it either by day or by night. It was a difficult decision to make.
'Normally 1 should have chosen to take it at night,' the Colonel said. 'There was little cover, and the approach would have been much easier in darkness. But there was another consideration. The Germans knew that no bridges could have been erected across the Rhine in so short a time, and that we should therefore have no tanks. Yet we did have tanks. The D.D. type, equipped with canvas floats, had swum the river under their own power, and three of them had just reached us. They would be of little use at night, and in any case I reckoned that their appearance at this stage, when the German soldiers must have been told by their officers that they had nothing to fear from that direction, would have a profound effect on morale, So I decided to send "D" Company in during the afternoon, I have regretted it ever since, '
The only reasonable explanation of "D" Company's behaviour that day is that they were in a white fury at their losses of the morning. A company of infantry tended to be almost a family affair, everyone knowing everyone else; and the death or wounding of twelve men earlier in the day meant that nearly every man in the Company had lost at least one friend and was determined to make someone pay for it. They were brilliantly led and their past training must have told; but there was more to it than that. There was tenacity and recklessness in that attack which I do not think existed to quite the same degree in any other the Company fought.
The day was grey and raw, and Groin was mostly smouldering piles of rubble and blackened rafters. The Rees/Haldern road ran through it, open and bare as it emerged from the village, but with an orchard or two and a few skimpy woods farther on where Hollands Hof commanded it and stood guard over the anti-tank ditch which cut it farther on stilL From Groin to the ditch was six hundred yards, In the early afternoon three tanks began to waddle along this road with "D" Company working up the ditches on both sides of them, and Jock Gardiner walking on the road itself, behind the leading tank, talking to its commander through the telephone attached to its tail.
History Section Reference :
Rhine Crossing
Museum Reference :
Documents - Rhine Crossing