Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund Charles Wolf Myers
Unit : Headquarters Royal Engineers, 1st Airborne Division
Army No. : 36717
Awards : Bronzen Leeuw.
Lieutenant-Colonel Myers was the Commander Royal Engineers of the 1st Airborne Division. He had two nicknames, "Eddie" Myers after the famous footballer of the same name, and, somewhat bizarrely, "Tito" Myers, due to his involvement with the partisans in Greece, although the name clearly implies Yugoslavia.
Shortly after landing at Arnhem on Sunday 17th September, Myers and Colonel Graeme Warrack, the senior medical officer, came to the aid of a glider pilot who was trapped in a Hamilcar glider which had overturned on landing. Such an event is usually fatal to both pilots as the cockpit protrudes above the fuselage, and indeed one of the pilots had been crushed to death, but the other was still alive yet trapped by the weight of the vehicle the glider carried. Myers reflected that a block and tackle would have been ideal in this situation, but he cursed himself for not having brought one with him, and so it was several hours before the pilot was released. Despite their best efforts, he later died.
On the evening of Friday 22nd September, Major-General Urquhart was very concerned that the 2nd British Army did not appreciate how desperate his position was, and so he ordered his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Mackenzie, to cross the Rhine in an attempt to locate either Lieutenant-Generals Browning or Horrocks to impress upon them the need for immediate relief. Lieutenant-Colonel Myers was also ordered to accompany him to assist with the attempts to ferry the Polish Brigade across the River. Urquhart also asked them to make a quick survey of the riverbank so that they could advise the Army of probable locations for a crossing.
The Division possessed a small number of inflatable dinghies, though many of these had been punctured during the shelling of Oosterbeek, but Myers had hidden one of those still serviceable on the riverbank. The two men, escorted by a large and possibly uninvited sergeant-major with a Bren gun, carefully made their way down to the bank and floated the dinghy along a ditch running parallel to the River until they found a suitable crossing point. Having decided upon a 200 yard wide stretch of the Rhine, the two men got into the boat and Mackenzie manned the oars. Crossing the River in broad daylight was an extremely risky undertaking, and a few shots were fired over their heads as they went, but both men arrived safely on the southern bank. A Polish escort had been arranged for them and their immediate task was to locate it. A short distance away they glimpsed two steel helmets but could not be sure whether Polish or German heads were underneath them. In the end Mackenzie stood up and waved a white handkerchief, while Myers remained hidden in case the worst should happen. Fortunately the two men were soon revealed as a Polish soldier and a British liaison officer, and using bicycles as transport, the four men rode to Major-General Sosabowski's headquarters.
Having reported to Sosabowski, Mackenzie concentrated on his efforts to contact the 2nd Army, whilst Myers busied himself with preparations to cross the Poles into the Oosterbeek Perimeter. He and the Polish Engineer Company spent the rest of the day trying to acquire boats and improvise rafts, however these proved to be barely adequate for the task.
On the following day, both Myers and Mackenzie attempted to travel to Nijmegen to locate Lieutenant-General Browning. They travelled in separate vehicles in a small convoy of three armoured cars, which had reached Driel during the previous day. They soon encountered an enemy armoured vehicle, which Mackenzie's armoured car fired upon, but this car was itself soon immobilised when it backed into a ditch and overturned. The remaining vehicles, one of which carried Myers, pushed on to Nijmegen, whilst Mackenzie successfully evaded capture and later joined Myers in Browning's Headquarters. The state of their appearance, after several days of battle and crawling across riverbanks, was somewhat shabby and Browning regarded them as "putty coloured like men who had come through a Somme winter". Despite the best efforts of these two officers to give Browning a clear understanding of the plight of the 1st Airborne Division, they left with the feeling that they had not been able to convince him of the severity of the situation.
The two men returned to Driel where Myers again oversaw preparations to ferry more Poles across the river, this time using assault boats of the 130th Infantry Brigade, however the Poles were given no crews to man the craft and they had to make the best of the situation themselves, resulting in a slow and inadequate number of men crossing by morning. Myers said "I can find no fault with their attempts; they did as much as they could. They had not been trained in river crossings, and the Arnhem plan had not envisaged one, and no one had any proper boats. But the less said about their watermanship the better."
On the following evening, Sunday 24th September, he was involved in similar preparations for the crossing that night of the 4th Dorsets, whom he was to accompany. The landing of two companies of this battalion was a disaster, and several DUKWS containing supplies of all kinds for the 1st Airborne Division, the loading of which Myers had supervised, similarly failed to get through to Oosterbeek. Myers, however, found his own way to Divisional Headquarters, where he informed Major-General Urquhart of the failure of the crossing and presented him with a now quite out-of-date letter from Lieutenant-General Browning, and another much more recent one that he had memorised from Major-General Thomas of the 43rd (Wessex) Division, informing Urquhart that the attempt to reinforce the Airborne Troops had failed and therefore they were to be withdrawn at a time of his choosing.
Urquhart decided that the Division would withdraw that same night (Monday 25th September), and much of the responsibility for organising this fell upon the shoulders of Lieutenant-Colonel Myers. Urquhart wrote: "On Myers fell the dual responsibility of selecting the routes and fixing the ferry service. He had hardly recovered from his ordeal of crossing the river in both directions only a little time before. Yet he managed to look extremely alert and he was, as usual, full of ideas. There was no need to underline just how vital were his technical experience and his qualities of character to the division's survival." During the night, Myers personally organised inevitable chaos that was the loading of groups men into the dwindling number of boats that were to take them across to the southern bank.
For his part in the Battle, Myers was awarded the Dutch Bronze Lion:
This officer is Commander Royal Engineers of the Division and took part in the battle of Arnhem 17th - 25th September.
On the 22nd September in company with another officer he crossed the river in order to make contact with the formations of the 2nd Army. This crossing was carried out in daylight in view of the enemy and the rubber boat in which he was travelling was at times subject to heavy enemy fire.
As the result of the arrangements he made, parties of Polish Brigade were ferried across the river that night and the one following. During the night 24th/25th September this officer took a very active part in assisting a Battalion of the 43rd Division to be ferried across in order to come to the assistance of the Division on the North bank. He personally took charge of several dukws containing medical stores and other supplies and supervised their crossing of the river. Unfortunately none of the stores were able to reach the Division owing to strong forces of the enemy being in between. Colonel Myers however, with great determination passed through the enemy lines and reached the Divisional HQ with valuable information and instructions for the future withdrawal to the South bank of the river.
The leadership shown by this officer and his imperturbable conduct in face of fire and under difficult conditions was a magnificent example to all those with whom he came in contact.