Colonel John Waddy
Parachute commander wounded during Operation Market Garden who went on to lead the SAS
COLONEL JOHN WADDY, who has died aged 100, was one of the last surviving British officers from the Battle of Arnhem; he later commanded the SAS. On September 18 1944, in the second lift of Operation Market Garden, 156 Parachute Battalion, part of Brigadier “Shan” Hackett’s 4th Parachute Brigade, embarked for Arnhem. The Brigade was tasked with capturing and holding the high ground to the north-west of the Dutch town, the aim of the operation being to establish a bridgehead over the Rhine.
Low mist delayed their departure by several hours; surprise had been lost and the enemy alerted. The battalion commanders were warned to expect hard fighting but the violence of the German resistance came as a shock.
Waddy, in command of “B” Company, recalled flying into antiaircraft fire and seeing families perched on the roofs of their houses in areas flooded by the Germans. Hackett had suggested that he monitor the route, and he was looking out of the open door when the aircraft to his right was hit on the port wing.
It caught fire and began a steep dive before exploding in a fireball when it hit the ground. Waddy looked at his men who were seated on each side of the aircraft but, with flak increasing, in the din they had not noticed what had happened. He said nothing.
As they approached the Drop Zone on Ginkel Heath, flying at 700 ft, he could see the upturned faces of the German gun crews. Snipers were shooting at the doors of the Dakota aircraft as he jumped. On landing, he found that the battalion was missing about 60 men. It was an hour before 156 Para was on the move. They were eight miles from Arnhem and encountering growing opposition in the failing light.
The following day, at 0700 hours, “B” Company’s first objective was to advance along the railway line to a point close to Oosterbeek railway station and to lay down covering fire to support “C” Company’s advance.
After completing this mission, Waddy was ordered to attack the German blocking line – the Dreijensweg – along a track through the Johanna Hoeve woods. He was leading his company when they were held up by heavy Spandau fire. A self-propelled, double-barrelled flak gun was slamming high explosive shells into scrub where one of his platoons was trying to edge forward and taking heavy casualties from splinters.
Waddy spotted the gun 150 yards ahead of him at the end of a ride. Taking a small group of men, he pushed through the undergrowth until he was within 15 yards of it.
At that moment, the soldier on his right was hit in the forehead by a bullet and killed as he was about to throw a phosphorus grenade. Waddy saw a sniper in the tree above the gun. He fired five rounds with the only weapon he had, his .45 Colt, but missed. He was then hit in the groin.
When he came to, he started to crawl away but the sniper fired again and the bullet hit the ground near his hand. He collapsed and pretended to be dead until a large Rhodesian private burst out of the bushes, picked him up and carried him 200 yards to the Company HQ.
At the regimental aid post the doctor, Waddy said, must have thought that his patient was beyond help and “just chucked me his silver whisky flask”. In the field ambulance casualty post he was given a plasma transfusion and then wrapped in a parachute and taken by jeep to the Hotel Tafelberg at Oosterbeek which was being used as a dressing station.
He was operated upon on the hotel’s billiard table and then moved to a house nearby. There he was wounded again when a mortar bomb scored a direct hit and killed six of the patients. After five days of attacks and counterattacks, with a stream of casualties being brought in, the position was overrun.
With the building on fire, Waddy, who had been wounded for a third time, was dragged out to a pile of 30 bodies in the back garden. When a sergeant carried him to a jeep, he thought reinforcements had arrived at last, but they were captured and he was taken to a German hospital at Apeldoorn. His battalion had suffered the highest casualty rate of any involved in the operation, with three-quarters of its men killed or captured.
At Apeldoorn, he was fortunate not to have his foot amputated, an over-common remedy at a time when German battlefield surgery had lagged well behind best practice. An orderly, with heavy German humour, told him,
“Never report sick with a headache.” When a Spitfire put a burst of cannon fire through the operating theatre, killing a British soldier and a German nurse, Waddy was upbraided by the matron for the RAF’S disregard for the Red Cross displayed on the roof.
After having had a two-inch sliver of shell extracted, he was taken by hospital train to Stalag VIIA at Moosburg in Bavaria. He spent three months in the POW camp hospital before being passed fit. The camp was liberated by the Americans at the end of April 1945.
John Llewellyn Waddy was born near Taunton in Somerset on
June 17 1920. The son of Colonel Richard Waddy DSO of the Somerset Light Infantry, and born into an Anglo-irish military family, he was educated at Wellington before attending Sandhurst.
He was commissioned into the Somerset Light Infantry in July 1939 and posted to India and the North West Frontier with the 1st Bn. In October 1941, he volunteered for 151 Parachute Battalion and was appointed Intelligence Officer.
Parachuting was in its infancy; there were no helmets in use, and while jumping through a hole in the floor of a Vickers Valentia biplane, he fractured his skull. It was three months before he recovered.
His battalion was redesignated 156 Parachute Bn. He used to say of his men that they were “like my spaniels, brilliant in the field but a bloody nuisance out of it!” The battalion took part in the capture of the Italian port of Taranto in September 1943. The landing was unopposed but the advance northwards to Foggia was hampered by ambushes and roadblocks set up by retreating German forces.
Between September 1945 and March 1948, Waddy served in Palestine on internal security duties, first at HQ 3 Para Brigade and then with 9 Para Bn. In 1947, while drinking in the bar, he was shot in the back and severely wounded. His assailant was thought to be a member of the Irgun paramilitary organisation. A brother officer was killed.
After a spell in Athens, where he broke his jaw, he attended Staff College, followed by a posting to HQ 1st Infantry Division in Egypt and Libya. He then commanded a company of 1st Bn Somerset Light Infantry during the Emergency. Patrols in the Selangor jungle earned him a Mention in Despatches.
Having volunteered to rejoin the Parachute Regiment, he was posted on exchange to the Airborne School at the Canadian Joint Air Training Centre, Manitoba. There he enjoyed undertaking Arctic exercises.
A posting to Jordan and then Cyprus as second-in-command of 2 Para was followed by command of the Parachute Regiment’s Depot. He set up the Parachute Regiment Battle School at Brecon, which is now part of the School of Infantry. He was appointed OBE in 1962.
In 1964 Waddy took up a newly created post as Colonel SAS, which has since evolved into that of Director Special Forces. He did much to develop new roles for the SAS in the postcolonial war period, and streamlined 22 SAS’S command structure.
After brief stints on the Army liaison staff in Washington DC and Fort Benning Infantry School in Georgia, in 1970 he was posted as defence adviser to the British Embassy in Saigon, during the Vietnam War; helicopter patrols during the day were followed by cocktail parties in the evening. His experience led him to suggest more use of helicopter co-ordinated operations to the MOD, but this advice was only implemented 20 years later.
He worked at the Joint Warfare Establishment in Wiltshire before retiring from the Army in 1974. For the next 15 years he was chief military adviser to Westland Helicopters, but in 1976 he took six months leave to advise on the film A Bridge Too Far directed by Richard Attenborough.
He was responsible for training the extras who portrayed Lt Col (later Major General) John Frost’s men at Arnhem Bridge and, with his fellow consultants, he did his best to ensure that some parts of the Americanproduced film were historically accurate.
Over the years, a bond of friendship developed between Waddy and the Dutch. Together with other veterans, he returned to Arnhem many times, and in 1982 he started leading staff college tours around the town, pointing out the errors made in the planning of Market Garden.
Later he did the same for parties of Dutch and British children, and he wrote A Tour of the Arnhem Battlefields (1999).
The last of seven generations of his family to hold a commission in the Army, to the end of his life he would have his gin and onions at lunchtime, a passion developed in India where the gin was undrinkable.
John Waddy married, in 1945, Ann Davies, whom he had met the previous year at Melton Mowbray; his battalion had been billeted in the town and she had been working in the remount depot. She died in 2012. There were no children.
His men, he liked to say, were ‘like my spaniels, brilliant in the field but a bloody nuisance out of it!’
John Waddy, born June 17 1920, died September 27 2020