Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  By preserving the docks, warehouses, locks, sluice gates, and other machinery, the resistance had done its part to end the war as quickly as possible. Now it was up to Montgomery’s forces to do theirs. Although the port was no longer under German control, it could not actually be used until Allied troops also controlled the forty-mile Scheldt River estuary, which linked Antwerp with the North Sea. Supply ships could not negotiate the estuary while its banks still bristled with German guns.

  Montgomery had received numerous warnings—from the Royal Navy, Belgian resistance leaders, and Eisenhower himself—about the vital importance of clearing the enemy off the estuary’s approaches. Admiral of the Fleet Andrew Cunningham, Britain’s first sea lord, declared that Antwerp was “as much use as Timbuctu unless the German forts were silenced and the banks of the Scheldt River occupied.”

  To sweep the estuary clean would have been relatively easy at that point: the Germans were on the run, and their defenses were cracking. “At that moment, had they chosen to do so, the British could have driven onwards up the forty-mile coast…with nothing to stop them,” Max Hastings wrote.

  But Montgomery, who had given the British their first battlefield victory at El Alamein in 1942, decided against it. There was no need to hurry, he thought. With the Germans so close to defeat, the mopping up of the Antwerp defenses could be done at the Allies’ leisure. Besides, his exhausted troops needed a couple of days to “refit, refuel, and rest” after their race across France. His decision turned out to be a strategic disaster and one of the worst Allied mistakes of the war.

  At the time, Montgomery was focused on what he considered a far more pressing issue: how to cross the Rhine River, just eighty-five miles away, and become the first Allied commander to enter Germany. On September 7, he informed London that he hoped to be in Berlin within three weeks, apparently not taking into account that a lunge like that would require food, gas, and other supplies that could arrive only through a major port such as Antwerp. Later, one of Montgomery’s top generals admitted that he, like his boss, never stopped to think about the necessity of taking the estuary. “My excuse,” the general said, “is that my eyes were fixed entirely on the Rhine, and everything else seemed of subsidiary importance.”

  To be fair, Montgomery and his subordinates were hardly the only Allied senior officers to feel that way. Drunk with their success in France, other field commanders and top SHAEF officers had also convinced themselves that the Germans, so close to collapse, were incapable of recovering. Victory was in their grasp, they were sure, perhaps as early as Christmas. On September 1, General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, told reporters that “militarily, the war is won.”

  Battered as they were, the Germans had other ideas: while the British celebrated in Antwerp, they were on the move. Just a few miles to the northwest, the German Fifteenth Army, an 80,000-man force that had been mauled at Normandy and lost most of its transport, had taken temporary refuge in the Pas de Calais area, not far from the southern bank of the Antwerp estuary. At that point, they easily could have been trapped by Montgomery’s army. Realizing that the Allied drive had come to an abrupt halt, Fifteenth Army commanders swiftly dispatched their men across the waterway northwest of Antwerp. While some were left behind to reinforce the estuary’s approaches, most escaped into Holland.

  Not until September 13, nine days after Antwerp’s liberation, did Montgomery assign the clearing of the port’s approaches—a “low-priority mission,” he called it—to the Canadian and Polish troops under his command. Because of the rapid buildup of German defenses, the Canadians and Poles didn’t have enough men for the job, and the operation was scrubbed until more troops became available. Ultimately, it would take three months to get rid of the Germans—a task that could have been accomplished in a couple of days had it been done in early September. With Antwerp still closed, Cherbourg remained the only supply port for the entire Allied Expeditionary Force. Gasoline and other supplies grew increasingly scarce, threatening to shut down the Allies’ headlong drive.

  Always reluctant to admit error, Montgomery nonetheless admitted after the war that he had made a “bad mistake—I underestimated the difficulties of opening up the approaches to Antwerp.” “Bad mistake” doesn’t do justice to his fumbled handling of Antwerp, which set off a chain of events that ultimately prevented the Allies from smashing into Germany and ending the war in 1944.

  As a result, many more people would die, soldiers and civilians alike. For the Netherlands, the consequences would be especially dire.

  —

  AFTER BELGIUM AND MOST of France had been freed, it appeared for a couple of glorious days that the Netherlands’ hour had finally arrived, too. In early September, residents of Dutch towns and villages near the Belgian border watched with delight as panicked German troops streamed past, all of them heading east. “It was a flight of dirty, exhausted, silent scarecrows on foot and of sleeping men in trucks,” an eyewitness recalled. “Hitler’s drilled divisions had changed into a miserable horde of frightened, hunted men.”

  According to rumors, the Allies were swiftly approaching the Dutch border. On September 3, the day of Brussels’ liberation, Dutch prime minister Pieter Gerbrandy went on the BBC to make it official: “I wish to give a warm welcome to our Allies on our native soil….The hour of liberation has come.” The BBC’s Radio Orange reported that the town of Breda, just a few miles from the border, had been taken, and Eisenhower, although a bit more circumspect, affirmed that freedom for the Dutch was imminent: “The liberation that the Netherlands have awaited so long is now very near.”

  Thousands of people, their arms filled with flowers, gathered joyfully on the outskirts of Amsterdam, The Hague, and other major cities, waiting to welcome their liberators. Waving Dutch flags, the cheering throngs shouted “Long live the queen!” and sang the national anthem. The troops never arrived, however, and the crowds discarded their flowers and flags and drifted home. The BBC backed off its earlier broadcast, saying that there were no further official reports about an advance into the Netherlands. Breda was still in German hands: the British troops seen there, it turned out, had been a patrol that had crossed the Belgian-Dutch border by accident.

  As the Netherlands’ residents soon discovered, Montgomery had halted his troops just short of the border and was keeping them there, despite intelligence reports from the Dutch underground that Germany no longer had enough forces in the Netherlands to stop a swift Allied advance.

  —

  THE REPORTS THAT MONTGOMERY ignored had come from a fair-haired, bespectacled young officer in Dutch battle dress, who paid a call on Montgomery on September 7 at his headquarters in Brussels. He was Prince Bernhard, the thirty-three-year-old son-in-law of Queen Wilhelmina and commander in chief of the Dutch resistance forces.

  The greeting that Bernhard received from Montgomery’s aides was somewhat less than enthusiastic. In fact, it was downright patronizing. But the prince was accustomed to not being taken seriously; ever since his marriage to Princess Juliana, he had been engaged in a battle to win respect from those around him.

  There were, as Bernhard himself acknowledged, a number of major strikes against him. He was German—and, even worse, he had joined the Nazi Party as a student. Before he was allowed to marry Juliana in 1937, an official inquiry had been held to determine his true political leanings. Finally, after he renounced his German citizenship and convinced Wilhelmina and the government that he was opposed to Hitler, the wedding was permitted to take place. “This is not the marriage of the Netherlands to Germany,” Wilhelmina assured her people, “but simply the marriage of my daughter to the man she loves.”

  In the stuffy, straitlaced circles of the Dutch court, Bernhard had been an anomaly from the start. He had acquired the reputation of a daredevil and playboy who, in the words of his friend Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, “exuded an aura of action and adventure.” Known for driving his Ferrari at high speeds, he came close to dying in a car accid
ent in 1938.

  When the Dutch queen and government had fled to England in 1940, Juliana and the couple’s two small daughters had been dispatched to safety in Canada. Bernhard had remained behind with his mother-in-law in London, where he had trained with the RAF, won his wings, and flown with a Dutch squadron in bombing missions over occupied Europe. Impressing Wilhelmina with his newfound seriousness and sense of purpose, he became one of her key advisers. In 1943, she appointed him liaison officer between the Dutch military and the rejuvenated resistance forces at home. A year later, he was named commander in chief of the resistance. If it hadn’t been for the war, Bernhard later said, “I would have been just another royal figurehead, lashed to the bow of the Ship of State.”

  Although considerable skepticism was aroused by his appointment, it melted away almost immediately. As London’s Daily Telegraph later put it, Bernhard “played a vital and rather under-appreciated part in fusing the Dutch military and amorphous resistance factions into one force which eventually spearheaded the Allied advance into the Netherlands.” Resistance members “adored him and listened to him,” his chief of staff said, “and by bringing these brave but jealous, idealistic but egotistical men together, Prince Bernhard performed a near miracle.”

  In his meeting with Montgomery, Bernhard reported that, according to Dutch intelligence agents, the route through Holland and across Germany’s vulnerable northern frontier was, for now, relatively defenseless. If Montgomery’s army moved immediately, it could bulldoze its way into the Ruhr, the industrial heart of Germany, and bring about the Reich’s defeat.

  Several German military leaders later agreed with that assessment. If the Allies had mounted “a major thrust resulting in a breakthrough anywhere,” Germany’s collapse would soon follow, according to General Günther Blumentritt, chief of staff to Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. Blumentritt was convinced that the Allies would indeed strike across Holland and into the Ruhr. Years after the war, Rundstedt said he had believed that the war would be over within two weeks.

  During their meeting, Bernhard cautioned Montgomery that the window of opportunity for such a thrust would soon close. The Wehrmacht’s retreat across Holland was slowing, reinforcements were on their way from Germany, and the German defenses at the Belgian-Dutch border were being rebuilt. But Montgomery rejected everything the prince told him, saying, “I don’t think your resistance people can be of much use to us.” It was obvious, Bernhard remarked, that “Montgomery didn’t believe any of the messages coming from my agents in Holland.”

  As part of his Englandspiel campaign, the Abwehr’s Hermann Giskes had planted seeds of distrust in the minds of British officials about the morale and security of the Dutch resistance. The general’s reaction also reflected the overbearing, often hostile attitude that many high-ranking British officers had toward their smaller European allies. Montgomery, whose command included thousands of European troops, was particularly noted for his lack of knowledge of and regard for them. Once, during a visit to a Polish division in his army, he asked its commander whether Poles spoke to one another in Russian or German. He was stunned to learn that they had their own language. About the European forces under his command, he wrote, “I would rather not have them at all.”

  Bernhard got the impression that Montgomery and his staff “considered us a bunch of idiots for daring to question their military tactics. I was sick at heart because I knew that German strength would grow with each passing day. But nothing I said seemed to matter.”

  Before Bernhard left, Montgomery unbent enough to give him an inkling of what he was planning next. “I am just as eager to liberate the Netherlands as you are,” he said, “but we intend to do it in another, even better way….I am planning an airborne operation ahead of my troops.”

  In fact, Montgomery had already approached Eisenhower for approval of his plan, which called for U.S., British, and Polish paratroopers to seize a series of bridges and canals in Holland and establish bridgeheads for advancing Allied infantry forces, who would then cross the Rhine and enter Germany. The last bridge to be captured, by the British 1st Airborne Division, spanned the Rhine at the Dutch town of Arnhem.

  The plan, called Operation Market Garden, presented many difficulties from the start. For one, the Allied offensive in Europe was literally running out of gas, thanks to Montgomery’s failure to open the Antwerp port. The fuel that was left was being fought over by the various field commanders, all of them “obsessed with the idea that, with only a few more tons of supplies, they could rush right on and win the war.” Montgomery, whom Churchill had just promoted to field marshal, told Eisenhower that the remaining resources should be his. He insisted that a bold thrust to the northeast, carried out by British forces and supported by U.S. troops, would have a much better chance than any other of breaking into Germany and bringing the war to a close.

  Initially, Eisenhower thought the proposal absurd. “Monty, you’re nuts,” he said. “You can’t do it.” He ordered Montgomery to focus on opening Antwerp, but the British general kept pressing him, and Eisenhower began to weaken. A sharp political undercurrent underlay their wrangling. Several weeks before, General George Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, had ordered Eisenhower to take direct operational command of all Allied land forces in Europe, replacing Montgomery, who had held that job since Normandy. It was time, Marshall felt, to underscore the United States’ dominance on the European front, no matter how much Churchill, Montgomery, and the rest of the British might protest.

  Montgomery was Britain’s most popular military figure, and Britons, including Churchill, were incensed by his demotion. But no one was more upset than the prickly, arrogant field marshal himself. Highly critical of Eisenhower throughout the war, he never fully accepted the move and repeatedly challenged the supreme commander’s authority for the duration.

  Although Eisenhower, in turn, disliked Montgomery, he felt it important to placate him as much as possible. But there was another reason for his lessening opposition to Market Garden. The more he thought about it, the more intrigued he became by its audacity: perhaps it could resurrect the weakening Allied offensive, as Montgomery promised. Like his critic and rival, Eisenhower was seduced by the idea that the German military was so shattered that it would not—and could not—mount a stout defense of its homeland. On September 10, he signed off on the plan.

  Market Garden was to be the greatest paratroop and glider-borne infantry operation ever staged behind enemy lines, far bigger and more complex than the airborne force that had landed in Normandy the night before D-Day. Months of planning had gone into that effort. For the operation in Holland, planners had been given just seven days to draw up a blueprint that, to have any chance of working, had to proceed like clockwork. Yet the chances of that were infinitesimal. The vast logistical difficulties of the airborne part of the operation all but precluded success. Equally daunting was the fact that the massive procession of tanks and ground forces assigned to relieve the paratroopers at the bridges would be forced to use just one highway—a narrow road that ran through marshy countryside, laced with dikes, for more than sixty miles. Before the war, the Dutch military had conducted an exercise using that same road for a simulated advance on Arnhem and decided it would lead to catastrophe. But the British never consulted the Dutch as they prepared for the operation. When Dutch generals learned of the route the British were planning to take, they tried to dissuade them, to no avail.

  Dutch intelligence operatives, meanwhile, passed on news of a heightened German presence in the area around Arnhem. Instead of the scattered, weak units that the planners expected, two elite SS panzer divisions had reportedly been relocated near the paratroopers’ landing spots. Equipped with heavy tanks, these units contained the best fighting troops in the German army, about to face off against British paratroop forces with no tanks or heavy weapons and very limited supplies of ammunition.

  When other intelligence sources confirmed the Dutch report, Major Brian Urquhart, the
chief intelligence officer for Market Garden, tried to impress on senior officers the gravity of the situation. They refused to believe him. “It was absolutely impossible to get them to face the realities,” Urquhart said. “Their personal longing to get into the campaign before it ended completely blinded them.” When he persisted, he was accused of being “hysterical and nervous” and was finally dismissed from the operation. The presence of tanks at Arnhem “was the one awkward fact that would not fit the desired pattern, so the best thing was to sweep it under the carpet,” the historian Ralph Bennett later wrote.

  Brigadier General John Hackett (right) with General Bernard Montgomery.

  Also voicing dismay over the “light-heartedness and inexperience of our airborne planners” was Brigadier General John Hackett, the thirty-three-year-old commander of the British 4th Parachute Brigade, which would take part in the assault on the Arnhem bridge. Born and raised in Australia, the Oxford-educated Hackett, who was known as “Shan,” had headed the brigade from its formation, leading it into battle in North Africa and Italy. He was known for his rapier wit, as well as for his “inability to suffer fools, especially senior officers.” Though the young brigadier was extremely popular with his men, his superiors considered him “rather argumentative, with firm ideas” that often did not coincide with theirs.

  One of those “firm ideas” was that Market Garden was a disaster about to happen. “After harrying a defeated enemy across western Europe, Allied commanders and staff tended to think they knew it all,” Hackett observed. “Those of us who had some experiences of fighting against the German army…knew that however light their existing strength was, a real threat to an objective of vital importance would be met with a swift and violent response.”

  General Stanisław Sosabowski, the commander of the Polish 1st Parachute Brigade, which would also fight at Arnhem, agreed. After listening to the planners’ optimistic views at one meeting, Sosabowski exclaimed, “But the Germans, the Germans! What about them?”