Arnhem Read online

  It was not just his belief in the superiority of his own military prowess that led him to this conclusion. He picked up on the sense of urgency that had developed among the Allies, and especially the British public, since the euphoria of D-Day. With hindsight, we know that final victory over Germany was close, just seven months away in fact. It didn’t feel that way at the time. For war-weary armies and civilians back home, the desire to see a glimmer of light was immense. Britain had been at war since September 1939, and the conflict had already outdistanced the 1914–18 War to End All Wars, by many months. London was under intense aerial bombardment again; sirens wailed and for the first time since the Blitz of 1940–41, women and children were dying in the rubble of their own homes, first from doodlebugs, Hitler’s revenge weapons, and then, the latest horror, V2 rockets. Morale – which should have been sky-high with the victories in Europe – was lower than it had been for years. An exhausted air hung over the country.

  The thought of another new year opening with the country still at war was almost intolerable. But wishful thinking would not win battles and hasten victory. Privately, Churchill admitted that neither the German army nor the German people were about to roll over. ‘It is as likely that Hitler will be fighting on January 1 as that he will collapse before then,’ he wrote in a memo on 8 September. Nonetheless, to counter the gloomy prognostications, there was an outbreak of wild, ‘if only’ optimism that it could indeed all be over by Christmas, particularly among the men now briefed for the major assault they were led to believe would do the job – Operation Market Garden. ‘We thought the Germans were on their way out,’ one recalled. ‘They were being pushed back so fast that we would be that final little pin that opened everything up.’10

  The belligerent Monty had finally got his way – well, partly, at least. At a meeting in Brussels, Eisenhower, weary himself not so much of the war but of his warring generals and their constant bickering and backbiting, agreed that Monty’s Second Army should mount a thrust of its own. This ‘left hook’ would sweep northwards through the Netherlands to try to outflank the German defences. Then it would descend on the industrial powerhouse of the Ruhr valley. His battle-plan – described by him with characteristic immodesty as ‘certainly a bold one’ – was for the Allied forces to drive hard and fast towards the Rhine and grab a bridgehead on the other side ‘before the enemy reorganized sufficiently to stop us’. That would mean first getting over numerous rivers and canals in the Netherlands, notably the River Maas at the town of Grave and the River Waal at Nijmegen. Each would be taken by storm from the air.

  To the American airborne divisions he gave the task of securing Eindhoven (20 miles behind enemy lines) and the bridges at Grave and Nijmegen (40 miles behind the lines), while to the British airborne division fell the hardest part – capturing the Arnhem bridge, 64 miles into enemy territory. Meanwhile, XXX Corps, the spearhead of the Second Army, commanded by Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks with the Guards Armoured Division in pole position, would set out from the Meuse-Escaut canal and race by land over the captured ‘carpet’ laid down by the Allied airborne troops to reinforce them and consolidate what they had captured. Within forty-eight hours, he was confident that XXX Corps would have linked up with the 1st British Airborne Division at Arnhem and secured a substantial bridgehead on the German side of the Lower Rhine. With that in place, more reinforcements would head eastwards and the Second Army would ‘establish itself in the general area between Arnhem and the Zuider Zee, facing east, so as to be able to develop operations against the northern flank of the Ruhr’.11 Next stop: Berlin. It was a plan intended to make the Führer tremble, demoralize his armies and undermine the will of the German people to continue a war they were now certain to lose.

  Pride of place in the operation was reserved for the British forces. Their objective – Arnhem – was at the furthest end of the line, their attack the deepest inside enemy territory. But it was a fight that the British 1st Airborne were up for. They had been seriously disappointed and even affronted at missing out on the Normandy landings. The 6th were dropped into France while the 1st were held in reserve and never used. There had been numerous schemes to deploy them in the advance through France and Belgium but, when German resistance collapsed in late August, the front line moved forward so fast that they never had the chance to drop behind it. At the headquarters of the Airborne Corps in the plush surroundings of the exclusive Moor Park Golf Club in Hertfordshire, detailed operations were drawn up by Major-General Roy Urquhart, commander of the 1st Airborne Division, and his staff, intensively trained for, then abandoned without a ripcord pulled or a shot fired. Gliders were loaded for action, then unloaded. ‘Order, counter-order and consequent disorder are the order of the day,’ Major Ian Toler, commanding officer of a glider squadron, noted ruefully in his diary, stuck with the unenviable task of keeping his men focused while stifling his own growing despair. ‘We just sit back and laugh, as always.’ But the joke was wearing thin.12

  Sixteen times in three months the airborne forces had been on the brink of going into action, on Op Transfigure, Op Wild Oats, Op Comet, or some such fancy name. They should have liberated Paris. Sometimes they got as far as boarding the plane before the order to stand down came, more often than not because their target had already been overrun by the advancing land forces. ‘The suspense was killing us,’ said Sergeant Ron Kent, a pathfinder para, whose job would be to go in just ahead of the main force and secure the drop zone. ‘The only fighting we were getting was with the Yanks in the pubs of Salisbury, Newark and Huddersfield!’13 Constant square-bashing, route marches and weapons training were meant to keep the men alert and ready but, as Kent explained, ‘We were like boxers, in danger of becoming over-trained, afraid of passing our peak.’ Each time they were stood down, they got a 48-hour pass to go to London to make up for having been confined to barracks in the run-up to the aborted mission. But each time, too, more puff went out of their sails and the sharp edges the fighting man depended on were blunted.

  Even the commander was losing patience and perhaps even some of his edge. ‘By the time we went on Market Garden we couldn’t have cared less,’ Urquhart conceded in an interview after the war.14 ‘We became callous. Every operation was planned to the best of our ability in every way. But we got so bored, and the troops were more bored than we were. We had approached the state of mind when we weren’t thinking as hard about the risks as possibly we had done earlier.’ Ironically, given all the delays and the hanging about, when Market Garden was conceived, it all came in a rush. It was 10 September before Urquhart was made privy to Monty’s master plan and two days later before he was in a position to brief his brigadiers and their staff officers for what was, in effect, a hurriedly revised version of Comet, the last cancelled operation. He didn’t like some of the conditions imposed on him, in particular the choice of drop and landing zones. They were too far from the centre of Arnhem in his opinion, a view many others shared. But this was the RAF’s call, and the judgement of its planners was that, if the planes flew in any closer, the German flak and the unsuitability of the soft, riverside ground for gliders to land would be major difficulties. Urquhart didn’t have time to win the argument, even if such a thing were possible. There were just five days to the off. And, anyway, after so many false starts, he was raring to go. He remembered ‘the euphoria which existed across the Channel and in the Airborne Corps that the war was nearly over and any new operations would be the final nudge to complete German defeat’.

  If the men themselves greeted the latest operation with scepticism, it was hardly surprising. The briefing Ron Kent was called to on Saturday 16 September seemed, at first, little more than a repeat of the one a fortnight earlier for Comet. ‘We were going to Arnhem. The dropping zone was about five and a half miles west of the town, well inside Holland and almost into Germany. If we could take and hold the bridge long enough we might be in Berlin by Christmas.’ That’s if they ever got off the ground. ‘What’s the betting we�
�ll be in London on a pass tomorrow?’ one cynic called out.

  Briefings were lengthy and thorough, poring over area maps, street maps, sand-tables, models and aerial photographs ‘until we felt as if we were almost natives of Arnhem’, as one para recalled.15 Dutch guilders were doled out, five per man, for use once on the ground and, optimistically, a few Deutschmarks as well. For many of the lads, the foreign money burnt a hole in their pockets and they quickly got the playing cards out. Medic Les Davison ended the equivalent of £56 up after a marathon game of brag in his hut. ‘Whether I would ever get a chance to spend it remained to be seen,’ he noted.16 But, for others, it was a much bigger gamble that occupied their thoughts that night. Some men were baffled and not a little worried by what they were told in the briefings. Wireless man Leo Hall was concerned whether the radios essential for coordinating this complex operation would have the range to work over the long distances involved. He also thought it ‘crazy’ to land and drop so far from the bridge, with a long slog to the target, during which the element of surprise might well be lost. On the other hand, they were assured that the opposition they faced would be light: ‘Only third-rate enemy troops in the area.’ Events would show this to be an awful error. So too was another part of the briefing – ‘Don’t trust the Dutch. Arnhem is close to the German border. They are probably Nazi sympathizers and Quislings.’ Nothing, as it turned out, could be further from the truth.

  That night, thousands of men in camps and airfields from Dorset to Lincolnshire and Gloucestershire to Kent passed the time as best they could. Some played football and darts noisily, others read quietly, lost in their own thoughts. In one barracks, a soldier with a pleasing baritone voice (and a heavy note of sarcasm) sang, ‘What a Lovely Way to Spend an Evening’, the new hit song from the United States. Many wrote letters, to be left behind and delivered home to wives, sweethearts, mums and dads if they did not return. These were hard words to think let alone put down in writing, even harder when biting back the tears and trying to disguise the fear and the regret. ‘Dear Mam,’ one young soldier of the South Staffordshire Regiment began. ‘Tomorrow we go into action. No doubt it will be dangerous and many lives will be lost – maybe mine. I am not afraid to die. I like this life, yes – for the past two years I have planned and dreamt and mapped out a perfect future for myself. I would have liked that to materialize but it is not what I will but what God wills, and if by sacrificing my life I leave the world a slightly better place, then I am perfectly willing to make that sacrifice. Don’t get me wrong. I am no flag-waving patriot nor do I fancy myself in the role of a gallant crusader fighting for the liberation of Europe. No, Mam, my little world is centred around you, Dad, everyone at home, my friends. That is worth fighting for – and if by doing so it improves your lot in any way, then it is worth dying for too.’17 He folded the pages, slipped them into an envelope and handed it to his platoon leader for safekeeping. With a bit of luck, he told himself, it would never be read.

  2. ‘A Piece of Cake’

  The morning of Sunday 17 September was beautiful, a surprise after a night of heavy rain. Now the late-summer air was filled with a high-octane scent of excitement, tension, fear and diesel fumes as thousands of trucks and planes kicked into life – and huge optimism. In the years of recrimination that followed, the unspoken misgivings of that morning would come to the fore. The plan was hasty and misconceived, a hurried bolt-on of previous abandoned ops. The drop zones were too far away; there were perfectly usable polders (river meadows) much closer to the target. The spreading of the drops over three consecutive days rather than in rapid and immediate succession meant the assault was too slow and left the initial strike force undermanned. The enemy strength was woefully underestimated, and intelligence to the contrary deliberately overruled. The ease and speed with which the relieving XXX Corps was expected to travel along a single narrow road to get to Arnhem in just forty-eight hours was unrealistic. All in all, it would be said, Market Garden was over-optimistic to the point of lunacy, a ‘bridge too far’, in the neat tag that will always be attached to it. And all this, it would be suggested, was as clear as day before the first glider pilot hitched up his tow rope.

  Except that it wasn’t like that. Every military plan has flaws; every commander has doubts and uncertainties he must overcome. Nothing is ever perfect. The days before the Normandy landings were fraught with worry. Eisenhower, by his own admission, was a nervous wreck – fearing the weather wasn’t right, that the enemy was stronger than he imagined, that his men might not even get off the beaches. He had prepared a sombre communiqué taking the blame in the event of failure and defeat. At some point, as Eisenhower did, you have to swallow the misgivings before they choke you. In that crude but telling Americanism which first became current among the cigar-chewing transatlantic military at around this time, it’s a case of piss or get off the pot.

  It was the same with Market Garden. For all the operation’s inherent faults, the archive of personal memoirs makes it clear that the men embarked on their mission that day with a remarkable fervour and an unshakeable belief in themselves. To Major Tony Hibbert, the gung-ho spirit was such that ‘if somebody had offered to drop us in the middle of Berlin we’d have been as happy as sand boys.’1 The fact that they had been stood down so often thus far added to their keenness to get on with it. Leo Hall was ‘excited at the prospect of making our mark on the war’. Ron Kent was proud not dismayed that the 1st Airborne had been given the toughest assignment of all, to get to the Arnhem bridge and hold it. He knew the Americans were getting the easier ride, to Eindhoven and Nijmegen, and didn’t mind. ‘We felt it right and proper that the hardest task should be handed to us,’ he said. Heads held high, he and thousands like him went willingly and eagerly to win the war. ‘We were invincible, weren’t we?’ recalled one man. ‘Completely confident that it was all going to go to plan.’2

  They were not scheduled to take off until 10 a.m. but, in Kent’s recollection, ‘we were woken up at some unearthly hour. We’d drawn our parachutes the night before and slept with them alongside us in our tents. Because of the rain, the camp was a quagmire and we queued in the mud to draw our breakfast in mess tins. Then we sloshed our way back to our bivouacs to consume the salted porridge, bacon and baked beans, a thick slice of bread and hot strong tea.’ It was still pitch dark as section commanders like him lined up their ‘sticks’ – the technical term for a section of paratroopers – and checked each man’s equipment by torchlight. ‘We’d been through it all so often before we could have done it blindfold.’ With dawn breaking clear and bright, they clambered on board trucks to take them to the airfield, the canvas backs lashed down to conceal them and their mission from the prying eyes of civilians. They had got this far and further before and been stood down at the last minute, but he felt certain this time they would go. ‘By 7.15 we were on the road to Fairford [in Gloucestershire]. Our parachutes, pre-fitted and chalk marked, followed in trucks behind. As we rolled round the perimeter of the airfield, we could see twelve big black Stirling bombers lined up at the end of the runway.’ Their taxis were waiting.

  At more than a dozen airfields, trucks filled with troops were arriving. In some, men sat in silence, pondering what lay ahead. In others, noisy chatter covered nerves or one soldier would begin to hum and the rest joined in until, as they careered at speed through sleeping villages, everyone was roaring out some reassuring ditty: ‘That’s my brother Sylvest/ Gawt a row of bloody medals on his chest, big chest/ ’E fought forty soldiers in the west/ That’s my brother Sylvest.’ At some airfields, they were welcomed with a rare treat – ham sandwiches, handed out by ladies of the WRVS. ‘I hadn’t seen boiled ham for five years,’ Leo Hall recalled. Each aerodrome bustled with intense activity around the planes, parked nose to tail, engines ticking over. Each ‘stick’ made its way to its allotted plane and sat down on the grass to wait. Not that sitting was easy. At Barkston Heath in Lincolnshire, Reg Curtis of 1 Para – feeling at one moment like ‘a
stuffed duck’ and then ‘a well overdue pregnant hippo!’ – checked off his gear: ‘One Gammon bomb, two hand grenades, combined pick and shovel, web equipment with small pack, two ammunition pouches, a canvas bandolier with 303 rifle ammo, a water bottle, mess tin, iron ration, emergency chocolate, field dressing, a camouflage net scarf, triangle-shape air-recognition bright yellow silk scarf which was tied around the neck ready for instant use, one rifle, an ingenious escape outfit comprising a silk map of Europe, a button compass about half an inch in diameter, a strong file as big as a nail file. That was about it, except for a kit bag strapped to my leg and parachute, plus Mae West life jacket in case we finished up in the drink. I also had a couple of hundred cigarettes and two bars of chocolate and some boiled sweets.’3 One para officer calculated his jumping weight at 22 stone, not including the folding bike he was carrying.