Arnhem was the perfect spot for the German army to lick its wounds. Arnhem sat far from the front and yet only forty miles from the German border, with solid rail lines and excellent security under Arnhem’s city commander, Generalmajor Friedrich Kussin, and his efficient security force. The citizens were docile and their Resistance units amateurish, meaning that sabotage of his tanks or the murder of his men simply didn’t concern Bittrich. Here they could get some sleep, take a bath, and live off the fat of the land courtesy of the many farms in the area.
By the second week in September, Bittrich had placed his tanks and personnel, including the grenadiers, outside Arnhem in the pretty little village of Velp and beyond, keeping them out of sight from the damned British fighter planes constantly snooping around and shooting at anything that moved. Bittrich figured if Velp was good enough for Reichskomissar Seyss-Inquart and SS man Rauter, it would do for weary Panzer troops.
The situation really did look bleak to Model and Bittrich, and the conclusion inevitable except for the intervention of some sort of miracle. Perhaps Hitler’s secret weapons could snatch victory from defeat. The jet fighter-bomber held such promise, as did the V2 rocket. If only both could be produced in sufficient quantities and deployed at once, the strategic advantages of the enemy might be checked.
If, if, if: Playing that game only led to frustration because the key ingredient remained a man at the top with skill and cunning, and that simply wasn’t the Führer. Maybe at one time, six or eight years ago, but not anymore.
Ah well, the end wasn’t coming today or tomorrow. There was time yet, and the job remained the job, to do the best with what was on hand and pull the occasional rabbit out of the odd hat. Both Model and Bittrich were very good at these things, and what better place to sit back and do a little relaxing than Arnhem, with its rolling hills so uncharacteristic of flat, waterlogged Holland. Arnhem had a zoo, an open-air museum, cinemas, restaurants, a city theater, and the Wehrmachtheim, a grand old concert hall. Maybe they could treat the staff to a ballet—just the tonic for men who had seen too much suffering and too much death, men who had earned a respite. Just a little one. A few weeks of peace and quiet; was that so much to ask?
19
The Hun on the Run
The world had just seen the passing of the fifth anniversary of war—five long years since Hitler had ordered blitzkrieg on Poland. The German Reich was being squeezed by the Russians from the east and the Brits and Americans from the west. Dutch Resistance reports said the dispirited German soldiers that were trudging north over the Arnhem Road Bridge and up Hoofdstraat—the men Audrey and Ella saw pass by every day—no longer wished to fight. But Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, knew the Germans hadn’t quit. In fact, they had dug in across the southern border of the Netherlands with Belgium, along the east-west Meuse-Escaut Canal.
It was the Netherlands that would become the next battleground, and that was a problem because this was a watery country with many rivers to cross. Eisenhower’s army couldn’t move through it if the Germans were to destroy the bridges across the Maas, Waal, and Rhine rivers. They might also blow up key dikes and flood major sections of roadway, which would trap his forces for months. But British Field Marshal Montgomery had an idea to change the game in the west, an idea that, if successful, could bring the war to a close by Christmas and get the Yanks and Brits to Berlin before the Russians. Why not load crack American and British paratroopers onto transport planes and drop them behind enemy lines at all the key bridges in the Netherlands? Use surprise to capture and hold all these bridges while the Allied Army under the command of Monty himself marched up through the Netherlands to the last and most important bridge of all, the span over the Rhine at Arnhem—right by the Muziekschool and the villa and girls school of Cornelia, Countess van Limburg Stirum.
The British paratroopers dropped on Arnhem would face nothing more than some Green Police and barracks troops that had grown fat and lazy in the restaurants of the city center. They would simply capture and hold the bridge and wait for Monty and the British 2nd Army to come rolling in from the south. Montgomery assured Eisenhower the armored column could make seventy miles in two days, but Lt. Gen. Frederick Browning, who was also in command of the British 1st Airborne, the paratroopers that would take Arnhem, offered the opinion that he thought his men might hold the Arnhem Road Bridge for a few days if necessary, then paused and added, “But I think we might be going a bridge too far.” To Browning it seemed especially ambitious to try to capture four major bridges spanning the Netherlands in forty-eight hours, as if there were no Germans along the way at all.
There were so many risks with the plan, which was designated as Operation Market Garden, that any one of them could have merited second thoughts. By their nature, paratroopers traveled light and wouldn’t have the support of tanks or heavy cannon. But Montgomery said their invasion would be so “rapid and violent” that they wouldn’t need heavy equipment.
Other risks involved getting 35,000 American and British jumpers into planes and over their drop zones. There simply weren’t enough planes in England for that number, so the planes would have to make drops spread out over three days to get all the men in. And at Arnhem, there was no good spot near the bridge for the parachutists and gliders to land. They’d have to come down nine miles from the bridge and make their way on foot.
But it would be all right. Arnhem was such a lovely, quiet city that had been spared during the war to a remarkable degree. The Germans didn’t pay it particular mind and except for the Deelen Air Base, which had been neutralized, Arnhem didn’t have a significant military presence. Montgomery saw his plan as a cakewalk, a nearly bloodless operation, and a dagger through the heart of the Reich.
Part IV:
The Liberators
20
The Netherlands in Five Days
Oosterbeek, the Netherlands
5 November 1954
International movie star Audrey Hepburn and her new husband, American actor Mel Ferrer, neared the end of a whirlwind Dutch tour. They had wed six weeks earlier in Switzerland, and after the crush of the Dutch press these past few days and the unending adoration aimed squarely at Audrey—with reporters and photographers all but pushing the tall Ferrer out of the way to get to his wife—the honeymoon was just as over as the tour.
Audrey had returned to the Netherlands to raise money for the Dutch Association of Military War Victims and had been run to exhaustion. She suspected she was pregnant, which she longed to be, and she and Mel had ripped through public appearances in major Dutch cities in which she urged her countrymen and women to donate for war relief. Along the way she had for the first time seen evidence of the heights she had achieved, as in the Amsterdam department store where thousands of fans of the Roman Holiday princess, mostly teenaged girls, had stormed security lines and instilled fear for her safety that Audrey hadn’t known since the war. In The Hague she managed to carve out a forty-minute visit with her opa, the baron, and his second wife, Mevrouw Anna Roosenburg. It was a crime to spend so little time with Opa after spending so very much—and depending on his calm maturity—through the last and most horrible year of the war.
This Friday morning she had visited a rehabilitation center in Doorn and offered each of the 225 young war victims a warm smile and simple, heartfelt words. She also had taken a one-hour tour of the facility to learn about the latest rehabilitation methods being employed and had made it a point to speak to every doctor, nurse, and administrator at the facility, telling them that she had come “to convey the gratitude of the Dutch people, who have a great respect for you.” In total she had shaken 250 hands.
After a drive east and a quick lunch, they reached the outskirts of quaint old Oosterbeek. In a moment their limousine glided to a stop opposite the Hotel Hartenstein, a gleaming ivory building behind expansive lawns that represented the best that this resort village had to offer. Across the street from the Hartenstein stood a tall obelisk in a landscaped circle:
the Airborne Memorial. A group of silent, well-dressed people awaited Audrey and Mel there. The couple carried a black wreath down a long path of cut stones, the only sound the clicking of their heels along the way. They set the wreath at the base of the monument. Each said a prayer, shook the hands of the dignitaries, and walked back.
The limousine drove them down into the center of Oosterbeek, which still showed some pockmarked villas, vacant lots, and broken trees to serve as reminders of the nightmare of September ’44. Their car swooped to a stop in front of Villa Maria, the Monné home at Utrechtseweg 136. Audrey and Mel rushed in past an iron fence still riddled with bullet holes for a quick hug and kiss for Dr. and Mevrouw Monné, for Miepje, Alex’s wife, and her two children. Alex was conducting business in Indonesia, but Audrey insisted that they stop and see her sister-in-law, the last of her relatives still in the area. Then the celebrities rushed back to their limo so it could zoom through a moment of countryside before reaching dear old battered Arnhem. They passed St. Elisabeth’s Hospital in a blur and shot down the hill past the train station and through the streets she knew so well in a lightning tour of ten minutes. There, the Schouwburg, unchanged from her last performance in February of ’44, now appeared small and sad after all she had seen of the world. There, the red brick apartment building on Jansbinnensingel and the third-story window that had been her perch to watch the Germans march in almost fifteen years earlier. Over there, the Musis Sacrum where she had first danced in public—long ago its name had been changed back from the Wehrmachtheim.
Arnhem was no longer a dead city, thank God. It had been cleaned up if not rebuilt, and she noted that the debris and the wrecked buildings had all been removed. She used to know every street and interesting building; now she looked upon a weed-covered expanse of flat nothingness in what had been Arnhem Centraal with only the odd building standing alone. They were all that remained of grand old Arnhem. In the pit of her stomach at times like these was the horrible old awfulness—memories of a blood-red sky.
In a flash they were off on a mad dash to reach Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam in time to catch a plane for Rome. During the walk to their gate, one of a group of reporters asked Audrey for a few minutes’ chat to get her impressions after five days in the country that had once been hers.
“Naturally,” said Audrey with a smile.
Ferrer had her at the elbow. “No you don’t,” he snarled, patience shot. “They’ve gotten enough.” As he pulled her away from the press she gave a gesture of “I wish I could help,” and a resigned smile. Then, one last obstacle stood before the six-foot-three actor and his five-seven wife: a three-foot nothing Dutch girl, age four, in traditional Volendam costume. She held tightly to an Edam cheese that covered her entire chest; it was all she could handle.
Audrey began to bend down to greet the child, and Mel stepped between them to disrupt the cameramen poised to capture the sweet moment. Audrey reached around her husband to lightly take the cheese from the Dutch girl and thank her with a smile, just as Mel pulled his bride up the steps of the plane. “Bye!” she called back, waving to the small crowd gathered to gawk one last moment at an international movie star. “Bye!” She was practically Dorothy, ready to be yanked by balloon out of Oz.
Every moment Audrey carried with her the understanding that her mother didn’t like Mel. In fact, she loathed him for stealing Audrey away and taking over her life. Ella didn’t hold back about it either; she told Audrey exactly how she felt and exactly what she didn’t like about the man, which was everything. There Audrey was, caught in the middle. She knew Mel worshiped her and, oh, how she had longed for a man to make her the center of his universe. He was eleven years older, and she found that dreadfully important because it meant he was mature and worldly, but mother didn’t like the fact that he had been three times divorced. She thought him a cad, like Ruston. The truth was that Audrey adored Mel for so many reasons, even though he could be intense and impatient, like now at the airport.
As she stepped into the cabin of the airliner, her feet were once again off Dutch soil. In her wake she had raised enough money to buy a seventeen-hectare parcel of land in Doorn that would see construction of twelve bungalows for handicapped war victims.
The wealthy, award-winning, married, and probably pregnant twenty-five year old settled into her seat and in a half hour watched the flat and green countryside recede beneath her. These days she could flit so easily from Switzerland to the Netherlands to Italy and then the United States. But the pregnancies of the coming several years, beginning with this one, would each end in miscarriage and cause deep depression and what seemed a bottomless well of grief.
Then there was that other sadness, the one that went wherever she did, always and forever. The war was her constant companion; she said so herself in many ways. And chief among the memories for Audrey and anyone else who had lived through it was that bright blue September day, a Sunday, when it all began, and the days that followed.
21
Ultimatum
“It was the war, and the war diet, and the anxiety and the terror,” said Audrey of the ever-worsening situation under the Nazis in Velp.
As August turned to September 1944, the people of Velp heard Radio Oranje report that the shooting war was out there. Among the Dutch, illegal radios had been treasured and kept safe, and daily the baron, sometimes with Audrey, would hurry across the street to the home of the Mantels for the 8:00 P.M. fifteen-minute Radio Oranje update of the Allied dash across France into Belgium. Now, the reports said the British and American armies had set up camp just across the Dutch border to the south, a mere seventy-five miles away. And when the Brits and the Yanks marched north and ran headlong into all the Germans in Oosterbeek, Arnhem, and Velp, life would not be pleasant.
Ella had had her gut feeling long before she had done the arithmetic—all those Allied troops out there plus all these Germans around here equaled trouble. Ella knew she must think about life after the war and away from those who knew her here in the early days of occupation. It might have seemed logical to take Audrey to Amsterdam, center of cultural activities in the country; then after the war, probably London. She would go wherever Audrey’s dance career dictated. She would live for Audrey.
But instead of Amsterdam, she had chosen The Hague. Said Dutch historical researcher Maddie van Leenders: “Ella and her family had some connections to The Hague that might have made her desire to move there more explainable. For example, Ella lived in The Hague for a while after she married her first husband, Hendrik Quarles van Ufford, and before they set off for the Dutch Indies. They lived on the Koningin Sophiestraat 4. Besides, The Hague has always been a city that was ruled by old, noble families, as in the Golden Age. When you enter the name ‘van Heemstra’ in the digital pedigree system of the [municipal] archive, about 157 results pop up. I don’t know how they are exactly related to the baron or Ella, but it shows that there have always been some connections between the city and this noble family. In addition, The Hague was a more thriving city than Arnhem, and the Dutch government has always been established there.”
The same day that Ella’s classified ad appeared, 2 September, Seyss-Inquart read reports of the Allied army poised to strike north from Belgium into the Netherlands and saw the need to order all German Nazi civilians living and working in Holland to return to the sanctuary of Germany. The order terrified the NSB Dutch living in Arnhem and Velp and all across the country; these Nazi loyalists knew they would be arrested by the Oranje Dutch or worse if the Allies seized control of Gelderland. Those with the means packed up and headed east in case the Allies were to suddenly appear and unleash Dutch nationalism that had been heating up like a covered kettle in the past couple of years.
Three evenings after the “rooms wanted” ad ran in Het Vaderland came something that would be known in the Netherlands as Dolle Dinsdag, “Mad Tuesday,” when rumors shot along the countryside and waterways that the Allies had blown through the German front line at the Belgian borde
r and were rushing northward into the Netherlands. The baron brought this incredible news home to the Beukenhof, and it seemed to be true since the flow of Germans through town had become a sudden flood, with weary, beaten soldiers stopping only long enough to loot some homes and steal what they could before they moved on. At times, gridlock occurred as thoroughfares crowded by Germans and every manner of escaping vehicle exceeded capacity.
But the euphoria of Dolle Dinsdag faded in succeeding days as no liberators appeared, and then the radio confirmed that the Allied ground forces remained stuck way down at the border of Holland and Belgium. Liberation remained a long way away.
Hoofdstraat in the center of Velp resembled a major European city, so crowded were the streets and sidewalks. Mother and daughter listened to a new sound, the Hawker Typhoon, a speedy British fighter plane that had been boasted of on the BBC. By this time every Dutch man, woman, and child knew the sound of each type of aircraft engine. They knew instantly what the Allied fighter planes sounded like, what was a Spitfire, Thunderbolt, or Lightning, and what was a German Focke-Wulf 190, Messerschmitt Bf-109, or Junkers 88. The Typhoon had a high and deadly buzz-saw growl about it. And Audrey didn’t find it a comforting sound, as it was the Allied planes that dealt death in Velp, the Tommies mostly, attacking moving trains or trucks or tanks riding along Dutch streets, and God help any Velpenaren who happened to get in the way. The Germans even put up propaganda posters about it around Velp. The poster showed bombs raining down from the skies with the words in red, van je vrienden—from your “friends” the Allies.
Dutch Girl Page 16