by John Nichol
In Britain, the praise heaped on the warriors of Arnhem was fulsome with ringing phrases: ‘a tremendous feat of arms’, ‘a gallant stand’, ‘an immortal story’, ‘British valour in the hell that was Arnhem’. A writer for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs was simply reflecting the national mood when he wrote, ‘Arnhem has left in history a record which those who come after must strain every ounce of courage and endurance they possess even to equal.’ Others looked to past victories for comparisons. Montgomery’s assertion that ‘In the years ahead, it will be a great thing for a man to be able to say “I fought at Arnhem,”’ had echoes, which cannot have been accidental, of Shakespeare’s Henry V at Agincourt.
As for the mission itself, the word ‘defeat’ was struck from the lexicon, just as the ‘retreat’ across the river had been presented as a more neutral ‘evacuation’. Newspaper reports spoke of a ‘lack of complete success’, as if Operation Market Garden had nearly made it, but not quite. ‘Four-fifths successful,’ said The Times, and its correspondent quoted a staff officer as saying that the battles at Arnhem and Oosterbeek should be considered ‘not as a brilliant failure but as an expensive success’. Official sources took the same line. Almost immediately, Arnhem was being presented as a near triumph. In The War Illustrated, a veteran commentator and retired general told the magazine’s mass readership that the airborne landings ‘accomplished enough to have made the heavy sacrifices entailed more than worth while. We now know how near we came to complete success and, but for the weather, it probably would have been achieved.’
The courage of those who took part was enough for everyone to overlook the fact that the assault force took two thirds casualties and failed in its primary objective. After Monty met and debriefed Urquhart, the field marshal wrote a letter for him to pass on to the men of the Airborne Division. It was rhetoric worthy of the occasion as he delivered his unambiguous ‘appreciation of what you all did at Arnhem for the Allied cause. I want to express to you my own admiration, and the admiration of us all in 21 Army Group, for the magnificent spirit that your division displayed in battle against great odds on the north bank of the Lower Rhine in Holland. There is no shadow of doubt that, had you failed, operations elsewhere would have been gravely compromised. You did not fail, and all is well elsewhere. All Britain will say to you, “You did your best. You all did your duty; and we are proud of you.” In the annals of the British Army there are many glorious deeds. In our Army we have always drawn great strengths and inspiration from past traditions, and endeavoured to live up to the high standards of those who have gone before. But there can be few episodes more glorious than the epic of Arnhem, and those that follow after will find it hard to live up to the standards that you have set. So long as we have in the armies of the British empire officers and men who will do as you have done, then we can indeed look forward with complete confidence to the future.’
The supreme allied commander, Eisenhower, also wrote to Urquhart in praise of the ‘courage, fortitude and skill’ of his ‘gallant band of men’. ‘In this war there has been no single performance by any unit that has more greatly inspired me or more highly excited my admiration.’ In their actions at Arnhem and Oosterbeek, the Airborne had, he declared, ‘contributed effectively to the success of operations to the southward of its own battleground’. In the House of Commons, a sonorous Winston Churchill made the same point. Drawing on his stirring ‘never in the field of human conflict’ style of oratory, he proclaimed that ‘the cost has been heavy, the casualties in a single division have been grievous; but for those who mourn there is at least the consolation that the sacrifice was not needlessly demanded nor given without results. The delay caused to the enemy’s advance upon Nijmegen enabled their British and American comrades in the other two airborne divisions, and the British 2nd Army, to secure intact the vitally important bridges and to form a strong bridgehead over the main stream of the Rhine at Nijmegen. “Not in vain” may be the pride of those who have survived and the epitaph of those who fell.’
‘Not in vain.’ What this oratorical flourish disguised was that the failure of Market Garden to meet its objective was a setback. The hard thing to swallow for the British people and the Allied armies – the disappointment that flowed from the Arnhem debacle – was that there was going to be no quick end to the war. The Germans had retreated through France and Belgium at an astonishing pace, like a defeated army on the run. The performance of those SS divisions at Arnhem was the beginning of the fight back. The Reich would stand its ground to the bitter end. All of this the politicians and the generals tried – quite rightly, some might say, in the middle of a war, with morale at stake – to conceal.
The problem was that their words transforming failure into success rang hollow. Churchill exulted in ‘the largest airborne operation ever conceived or executed’ and how it had helped achieve ‘a further all-important forward bound in the north’. Except that it hadn’t. That ‘forward bound’ was into a cul-de-sac. Leaders and generals are apt to dismiss as ill informed or just plain wrong the views of the rank and file, deprived of the bigger picture. What would they know? But Leo Heaps, who fought at Arnhem and lost – and knew that he had lost because he endured months of imprisonment as a result – had no qualms in describing the Arnhem he experienced as ‘that disastrous hiccup in the liberation of Europe’. There is every reason to think he was right.
Yet, in the immediate aftermath, it was now the consensus view that capturing the bridge at Nijmegen had been the key objective of Market Garden and therefore the important contribution of the Airborne Division had been in keeping the Germans tied up at Arnhem and Oosterbeek while that bridge 10 miles south was secured. ‘Your losses have been very heavy,’ a seemingly sorrowful Horrocks wrote to Urquhart, ‘but in your fighting north of the Lower Rhine, you contained a large number of German reserves and prevented any reinforcements from moving down towards Nijmegen, [which] gave us time to secure those vital bridges.’ Browning wrote in similar vein. ‘Without the action of the 1st Airborne Division in tying up, pinning down and destroying in large numbers the German forces in the Arnhem area, the capture of the bridges at Nijmegen would have been quite impossible.’ It is hard, reading the correspondence and the speeches sixty-five years later, not to conclude that the military establishment was suffering from collective – and convenient – amnesia. Hadn’t Arnhem been the principal objective, so that the Second Army could make its dash to the Ruhr? That was certainly what those thousands of paratroopers and glider pilots holed up in Arnhem and Oosterbeek and waiting for the promised deliverance had believed, and it was why many had given their lives and even more their freedom. But in the aftermath, there seemed to be a total unwillingness to recognize that the Second Army had failed to deliver and, as a result, the brave men of Arnhem had been cut off behind enemy lines and sacrificed.
Arnhem was a defeat. There can be no doubt about that. And there were recriminations. The Allied high command, in need of a scapegoat, vented their exasperation on the Polish general, Sosabowski, for supposedly lacking zeal. His vociferous and justifiable complaints about the operation were used in evidence against him, and he was fired. Browning was exonerated of any blame but was never promoted again. Horrocks, though, went from strength to strength, untainted by any criticism. His XXX Corps finally reached the Rhine in March 1945 after a fierce and costly battle for the Reichswald forest, which would never have been necessary if the Arnhem ‘left hook’ into Germany had been pulled off six months earlier. As for Montgomery, his reputation took a huge knock, not least with the Americans, whom he disliked and who disliked him in return. In his memoirs, published fourteen years later, he admitted mistakes and ‘bitter disappointment’, but in such a way that, characteristically, he shifted the blame on to others. He put up a raft of excuses and explanations or, as he put it, ‘reasons why we did not gain complete success at Arnhem’. He blamed himself for not insisting that the drop zones were closer to the bridge – not as humble a mea culpa as it
sounded, because everyone knew that this had been the RAF’s call, not his – but, otherwise, it was primarily Eisenhower who was at fault for being half-hearted and hedging his bets and under-equipping him with men and materials. And then there was the weather, which ‘turned against us after the first day. But weather is always an uncertain factor, in war and peace. This uncertainty we all accepted. It could only have been offset, and the operation made a certainty, by allotting additional resources to the project, so that it became an Allied and not merely a British project.’ In other words, if Montgomery was to be believed, even the problems created by the weather were down to the American supreme commander.
But in this defeat on the banks of the Lower Rhine, there was also victory for the Airborne at Arnhem, and a notable one at that. The courage of the men who fought it, who endured and who gave up only when ordered to, was a magnificent triumph of the spirit. A reporter welcoming some of the exhausted men back listened to their stories of ceaseless enemy attacks with flame-throwers, tanks and self-propelled guns firing high-explosive and armour-piercing shells, but what truly amazed him was when they added: ‘When can we go back? We have to go back to get the rest of our chaps out.’6 He concluded rightly that ‘they were beaten in body but not in spirit.’ A para sergeant-major spoke for the entire division when he wrote – in an anonymous memoir entitled simply ‘I was there’7– that ‘I am proud to have fought at the Battle of Arnhem, not just to have been there but to have been side by side with men of courage and determination, so many of whom did not come back.’
Lieutenant Bruce Davis was an American airman who went on the Arnhem mission as a ground observer, tasked to scout locations for a US air force signals operation behind the German lines. Instead he was caught up in the fighting. American servicemen did not always rate their British allies, but his report when he got home was an extraordinary encomium. ‘Courage was commonplace and heroism was the rule not the exception,’ he wrote, not about himself – because ‘I was badly scared a great deal of the time’ – but about the British companions he found himself fighting next to. ‘I saw men who were hungry, exhausted, hopelessly outnumbered, men who by all the rules of war could have gladly surrendered and had it all over with, men who were shelled until they should have been hopeless psychopaths, and through it all they laughed, sang and died, and kept fighting because they were told this battle would shorten the war. They absorbed everything – mortars, tanks, S-P guns, machine guns – everything in the book, and kept coming up for more. The German infantry was scared of the Red Berets and would not attack without the help of armour or big guns. There was constant evidence that they gave Jerry the fright of his life. And the amazing thing about the British was that they carried on with the light-hearted abandon of a Sunday-school class on their first spring picnic. What I learned from the Arnhem operation was that men born and bred as free men have a great strength and willpower, which they never suspect until they need it.’8
A good number of those brave men were still having to call on their reserves of strength and willpower. Not everyone had escaped across the river or gone into captivity. There were an unknown number of airborne men on the loose and in hiding in that German-held area of woods, heaths and farmland north of the Lower Rhine. This was the postscript to the Battle of Arnhem: the continuing fight to survive and stay free long after it was over. They would trickle back to their own lines over the next weeks, some individually, others in groups organized by the Dutch Resistance. Some would lie low, protected by brave local families but in constant danger of discovery or betrayal, for more than six months, and not get home until the Netherlands was finally liberated and the war was very nearly over. The hundreds who made their way home in the months after Arnhem knew that they owed their survival and their salvation to the Dutch. Glider pilot Alan Kettley not only escaped – first from a moving train heading into Germany and then across the Waal to his own lines – he also went back on undercover missions to help others to come out. But he felt his bravery was eclipsed by the courage of the Dutch underground movement. ‘If any of us had been captured, it was a POW camp. But for the Dutch it meant they and their families would be shot and their houses burnt down. The Dutch resistance, the Dutch civilians, were the real heroes.’
But so too were the evaders, and every one of them had an incredible story to tell. The first to get home was Major Eric Mackay, who had fought so determinedly to hold the school building at the Arnhem bridge until forced to surrender. His escape was surprisingly easy, even though it was from inside Germany. His captors had quickly spirited him away with the remnants of his company to a transit camp south-east of Arnhem and just over the border in the town of Emmrich. He dropped out of a window and on to a street. With three others, he hiked back over the Dutch border and made for the Rhine, where they stole a small boat. ‘It had no rudder and just one oar but once we got into mid stream there was a good current running.’ They came to the major fork in the river, where the right channel became the Lower Rhine and flowed towards Arnhem and the left-hand one was the Waal and would take them to Nijmegen. The river was so wide here they almost got lost as well as nearly run down by a massive barge. Then Mackay saw the familiar shape of a large bridge ahead. Was it Arnhem? Had they taken a wrong turn and been swept back to where they started? To his relief, it was the Nijmegen bridge they were approaching, all too recently secured by the Allies. He heard a voice say, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ and he knew he had made it. He had been so quick he was back behind his own lines even before the evacuation from Oosterbeek was ordered, let alone carried out.
For others, however, getting home was proving much harder. Major Tony Hibbert, another of the heroes of the fighting at the bridge, had been captured hiding in a coal shed in the wreckage of Arnhem and was on board an open 3-tonner lorry and en route to Germany when he grabbed his chance to escape. ‘There were thirty of us, mostly officers, crammed in with two old Luftwaffe guards armed with pistols and rifles. There was a third guard with a Schmeisser sitting on the front mudguard. We continued giving V-signs to the Dutch as well as the odd German, and every time we did this the corporal on the mudguard lost his temper and stopped the lorry to tell us he’d shoot us if we did it again. But we carried on, because every time we stopped it took some time for the lorry to build up speed again. That was our opportunity.’ He jumped over the side. ‘I hit the road hard and there was lots of blood, but nothing seemed broken.’
There was pandemonium. A fellow escaper was downed by the corporal’s machine gun as he climbed over a wall, but Hibbert had luck on his side and was away. ‘I made a dash for the nearest side-turning, zigzagging to avoid the bullets, and crashed straight through a wooden fence. Then I zipped through half a dozen gardens and decided to go to ground. I covered myself with logs in a small garden hut and listened to the weapons still firing in the streets and the shouts of the search party.’ He would discover much later that his escape had been costly. ‘The corporal with the Schmeisser had completely lost his head and turned his gun on the back of the lorry, killing Tony Cotterill [a British war reporter] and another, and wounding eight more. He was threatening to kill the others when a German officer who was passing managed to get matters under control. It’s something that’s been very much on my conscience ever since.’
Unaware of these developments at the time, Hibbert waited until it was dark and headed away from the town and into the countryside, planning to seek help. ‘After I’d gone 2 or 3 miles I found a small, isolated farmhouse. I pulled hard at the bell and tapped on the window, and eventually a very suspicious man stuck his head out and shone a torch on me. I was wearing a groundsheet and my face was covered in blood and bruises, so the glimpse he’d had of me can’t have been very reassuring. It soon became clear he wasn’t going to let me in, and I left. I was told later that he thought I was a German deserter. When he heard the next day that I was a bona fide Englishman he burst into tears and spent the rest of the day bicycling about looking for me.’ But, thro
ugh another farmer, the major did make contact with the Underground and was sheltered for three weeks with a family in the town of Ede. He discovered he was one of numerous escapers in the area, including half a dozen officers of his brigade. ‘We formed a new Brigade headquarters in a butcher’s shop in Ede. Every morning, dressed in an odd assortment of civilian clothes, we met in the back room to prepare plans for a mass escape.’
Among those officers was Brigadier Lathbury, commander of 1 Parachute Brigade, who had slipped away from the St Elizabeth Hospital to avoid being sent to Germany. After a miserable time spent ‘skulking’ in a hut in the woods, he’d fallen on his feet when he was secretly billeted in the large country house belonging to a ‘most charming’ countess. She and her husband had no fewer than sixty refugees in and around their country pile. But no one could tell the brigadier what was happening with the fighting, though he had a bad (and correct) feeling that the bridgehead at Oosterbeek had been abandoned. There were rumours (also correct) that the focus of the main Allied thrust had shifted away from Arnhem. If that was the case, then a quick sortie to escape over the river would not be possible. ‘It began to look as though we might have to wait here for weeks, possibly until our own troops arrived.’ (The latter was wishful thinking, though a lot of the evaders believed it.) Another strong rumour was that the Germans, who were already rounding up any young people they could find for war work, were going to evacuate all the villages. There was a lot to worry about.