The battle for the Renkum ferry

Wilf Oldham, an Airborne veteran, was one of them, and he recounted: “Our mission was to secure the Renkum ferry and to hold off the Germans from the brick kiln, who could attack the Airborne area from Wageningen. At first, we encountered no resistance — we had no trouble with the few Wehrmacht soldiers we saw. They weren’t German but Ukrainian or something like that.”

On the afternoon of September 17, 1944, B Company of the Airborne Brigade entered the village of Renkum. They occupied the ferry landing to secure transport across the Rhine. The brick factory was designated as a fort. From the clay mound there, the Wageningen–Arnhem route could be well monitored. To improve the field of fire on the Utrechtseweg / Dorpsstraat, the first houses on the Dorpsstraat were destroyed. The inhabitants of Renkum felt liberated. All wartime stories from Renkum later began the same way: “In the afternoon, there were suddenly English soldiers on the Dorpsstraat with cigarettes and chocolate. The people of Renkum celebrated and hung out their flags — hooray, we were liberated!”
But things turned out differently…

That night, the Germans managed to take up positions at several locations in Renkum. On September 18, they fired from behind the church and set fire to the farm near the brick kiln. There were casualties — both soldiers and civilians. The attacks on B Company grew more intense. Villagers retreated into air raid shelters, or anything that could serve as such. By Wednesday, the company withdrew. The ferry was once again in German hands.

Wilf Oldham and his B Company moved along the foot of the Noordberg toward Oosterbeek. In that hell, only 23 of his 143 company comrades survived. Wilf Oldham carried guilt throughout his life for being one of the few who made it out alive.

In 2013, Jeroen Niels, grandson of the ferry operator at the time, wrote in his book:
The ferry had a strategic role until December 1944. The Germans attempted to use it to transport heavy equipment across the river to attack the Allies in the Betuwe. But the plan proved difficult to execute. The Germans decided on a different course of action. On December 2, they breached the Rhine dike at Elden, causing the Renkum ferry to lose its strategic value. The brick kiln and the village were completely shelled in the final months of the war. Only the chimney of the brick kiln remained standing. The site was cleared in the 1950s. Today, the remnants are a municipal monument — also because of the brick kiln’s role in the war.

The Toer van Peelen is a podwalk that starts at the Renkum ferry landing and leads past 13 audio points throughout the village. Points 5 to 10 cover the Renkum section of Operation Pegasus I; the others highlight the Battle of Arnhem and the role of the Air Raid Protection Service and Jan Peelen. Click here for more information.