Zwarteweg 14 is an ordinary terraced house in the Lombok district of west Arnhem, a short walk from the old St Elisabeth’s Hospital. A small piece of wood by the door, hand-painted with the words “Urquhart House,” is the only sign that anything happened here. Most people walk straight past it.
In September 1944 this house held the commander of the entire British 1st Airborne Division.
The commander goes forward
Major-General Roy Urquhart landed near Arnhem on 17 September with one task: take and hold the road bridge over the Neder Rijn. Almost at once his radios failed. He could not reach his brigades and had no clear picture of the advance. So he did what a divisional commander should never have to do. He went forward himself to find out what was happening.
Cut off in the streets
He found Brigadier Gerald Lathbury of 1st Parachute Brigade, who had the same trouble with his own radios. Trying to work their way back, the party took a wrong turning towards the German positions. A burst of machine-gun fire hit Lathbury in the back. The others dragged him into a nearby house and left him there. As they did, a German soldier appeared at the window, and Urquhart shot him at point-blank range.
He pressed on with two officers, Captain Taylor and Lieutenant Cleminson, through back gardens and alleys. The streets were full of German patrols. If they kept moving, the Germans would take them prisoner. At Zwarteweg 14, Anton Derksen and his family took the three men in and showed them up to the attic.
Trapped in the attic
Then a German StuG III assault gun pulled up in the street directly outside, infantry around it. Now the most senior Allied officer on the ground could not leave the house. He could not reach his headquarters. He could not influence the battle. He could only listen to the fighting a few streets away. He later described himself as a spectator.
Meanwhile command of the division passed to Brigadier Philip Hicks. At the opening of the battle, at the moment it most needed direction, the division had no commander in contact with it.
Back to Oosterbeek
The assault gun moved on early on 19 September. British troops attacking towards the bridge reached the corner of the Zwarteweg, and Derksen got word to them. Urquhart and his officers ran out, found a jeep, and drove to the Hartenstein at Oosterbeek. He had been gone for around thirty hours. That count runs from when he first left his headquarters, not from the attic itself.
I bring groups to the Zwarteweg on my Arnhem tours, walking the route Urquhart took that got himself trapped in the attic.
The bridge he had been trying to reach held until 21 September, when German troops overran the last of Frost’s men at the northern end.
