Arnhem

by William F Buckingham

  With the British Airborne end of the battle effectively over there remained the reckoning. On 17 September 1944 the 1st Airborne Division’s strength stood at 8,969 All Ranks, although it is unclear if this figure included or excluded personnel assigned to the Division seaborne tail, which had been despatched to France by sea six weeks earlier.34 In addition there were 1,338 men from the Glider Pilot Regiment and 1,625 men from the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade, a total of 11,932.35 By Tuesday 26 September 1944 between 1,485 and 1,543 were dead, and 6,525 were either prisoners of war or evading capture on the north bank of the Lower Rhine.36 The ratio of Airborne killed to wounded and/or missing was the conventional approximation of one to two; the Glider Pilot Regiment suffered between 219 and 229 killed from a combined total of 730 killed, wounded or missing for example, while the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade lost between ninety-two and ninety-seven killed from a casualty total of 342.37 30 Corps losses totalled 1,480 killed, wounded and missing between 17 and 26 September.38 The air effort to deliver and supply the 1st Airborne Division was costly, the RAF transport formations losing a total of sixty-eight machines, forty-four Stirlings from No. 38 Group and twenty-four Dakotas from No. 46 Group; of these, twenty-five were brought down by anti-aircraft fire and the remaining eight were downed by German fighters. A total of 238 RAF and RCAF aircrew were lost with the aircraft, of which 157 were killed and 81 became prisoners of war, while another 152 avoided capture to become evaders. In addition, seventy-nine RASC despatchers working in the downed aircraft were killed and a further thirty-one were captured.39 The USAAF lost eleven C-47s delivering elements of the 1st Airborne Division and the Polish Brigade, four from the 314th Troop Carrier Group and seven from the 315th Troop Carrier Group, along with twenty-three aircrew killed and three captured; a further twenty-three evaded capture and made their way back to Allied lines.40 German losses are unclear due to incomplete records but estimates suggest the units fighting at Arnhem and Oosterbeek suffered between 2,565 and 5,175 casualties, and between 6,315 and 8,925 for MARKET GARDEN overall.41 Nor was the cost restricted to the combatants. An estimated 453 Dutch civilians were killed across the MARKET GARDEN battlefield ‒ but their ordeal did not end with the Driel evacuation. On 23 September 1944 the Germans ordered around 100,000 Dutch civilians out of a zone north of the Lower Rhine, which they then systematically plundered for materials for their new defences. Civilian rations in the Netherlands were significantly and deliberately reduced by the Germans, resulting in the death of 18,000 Dutch civilians in the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944-1945.42 It is unsurprising that Prince Bernhard of the Netherland’s responded to Montgomery’s claim that MARKET GARDEN was ninety per cent successful with the observation that his country could ill afford another Montgomery success.43

  Operation BERLIN did not mark the end of the fight for all the Allied Airborne formations involved in Operation MARKET. Although it is frequently overlooked, the two US Airborne Divisions remained embroiled in the fighting along the Airborne Corridor for several weeks after the British 1st Airborne Division had been repatriated to the UK to rest and refit. The 82nd Airborne Division was not withdrawn from Holland until 11 November 1944 after fifty-six days in continuous action, while the 101st Airborne Division remained in Holland until almost the end of November 1944; both formations were then back in action in the Ardennes by the middle of December. The scale of loss suffered by the two US Airborne Divisions during their longer time in Holland was of a similar magnitude to that of the 1st Airborne Division. The 82nd Airborne Division suffered 215 killed, 790 wounded and 427 missing, a total of 1,432 men while the 101st Airborne Division lost a total of 2,118 men, 315 killed, 1,248 wounded and 547 missing; in addition, 122 US glider pilots were lost, twelve killed, thirty-six wounded and seventy-four missing.44

  Two of the bridges around which MARKET GARDEN had focussed did not outlast the official end of the operation either. On the night of 28-29 September 1944 Kriegsmarine combat swimmers succeeded in dropping a complete span of the Nijmegen railway bridge and also damaged the adjacent road bridge, whilst it was being guarded by a Close Bridge Garrison commanded by 43rd Division CRE Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Henniker.45 The Arnhem road bridge may have survived being the centre of several days’ desperate fighting but did not survive the attentions of the USAAF’s 344th Bombardment Group, which dropped the structure into the Lower Rhine just over a week after lieutenant-Colonel Frost and his men had been finally overwhelmed. The destruction of the road bridge trapped the bulk of the German force south of the Lower Rhine, and prompted Generalleutnant von Tettau to establish a bridgehead on the south bank of the Lower Rhine two kilometres downstream from the Heveadorp ferry on 1 October 1944. In a virtual mirror image of events in Oosterbeek just a week before, a force commanded by Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Oelkers crossed the river and held out for ten days under near constant artillery and mortar fire backed by ground attacks from the 5th Dorsets and then units from the 101st Airborne Division. The German bridgehead was finally evacuated on 10 October 1944 and Oelkers was the last man out on a riddled inflatable dinghy.46

  There remained two pieces of unfinished business connected to Operation MARKET GARDEN. The first was the fate of those marooned on the north bank of the Lower Rhine, estimated to number between 200 and 400 men.47 Some had been left at the embarkation point when the evacuation was called off, others had either evaded capture or been captured and escaped earlier in the battle. Lieutenant-Colonel David Dobie from the 1st Parachute Battalion had been wounded and captured in the brutal fighting on the Onderlangs on 19 September for example; he ran out of the civilian hospital where he was taken for treatment while the guard was distracted and was taken in and treated by a Dutch doctor in Arnhem before making contact with the Dutch Resistance. He was then moved to Ede where he was closely involved in locating and gathering the Airborne evaders along with other officers, notably Major Digby Tatham-Warter from the 2nd Parachute Battalion.48 Dobie was smuggled across the Lower Rhine and River Waal by the Dutch Resistance on the nights of 16-17 and 17-18 October 1944 carrying intelligence for British 2nd Army HQ, which decided to evacuate the evaders.49 Dobie then played a key role in Operation PEGASUS, a joint effort to evacuate a large number of evaders involving the Dutch Resistance, a Belgian SAS team, senior officers among the evaders and the 2nd Battalion 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which had maintained a frontage on the Lower Rhine opposite Wageningen from 3 October 1944.50 Arrangements were made with Major Tatham-Warter via the still-functioning local civilian telephone system, which remained free from German monitoring, while a fighting patrol from the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s Easy Company was to bring the evaders across the river covered by a pre-arranged artillery box barrage and using twenty-three British-supplied assault boats.51 According to one source the assault boats and crews were provided by the 43rd Division, although it is unclear if they were drawn from 204, 260 or 533 Field Companies RE or a combination thereof.52

  The operation was brought forward twenty-four hours to take advantage of the road traffic created by a German village evacuation operation at nearby Bennekom, and thus went ahead on the night of 22-23 October 1944. The Germans remained oblivious to what was going on and matters proceeded without a hitch, apart from the evaders losing their bearings and initially missing the place where the boats were waiting alongside a ‘rather annoyed’ Lieutenant-Colonel Dobie.53 They were all were safely inside the 506th Regiment’s lines on the south bank by 02:00 on 23 October.54 The precise number of men brought across the Lower Rhine is unknown but there were between 138 and 150, amongst them ten Dutch volunteers for Allied service, four USAAF personnel, two escaped Soviet prisoners of war and a solitary soldier from the US 82nd Airborne Division; all were brought across the Lower Rhine safely bar one of the Soviet prisoners, who disappeared at some point.55 At least 120 were personnel from the 1st Airborne Division including Brigadier Gerald Lathbury, commander of the 1st Parachute Brigade, Major Tatham-Warter and Major Antho
ny Deane-Drummond from the 1st Airborne Divisional Signals.56

  Major Deane-Drummond’s prior activities had been quite an adventure. After spending three days cut off in a German-occupied house near the Arnhem road bridge with a small party of men from the 3rd Parachute Battalion, he swam the Lower Rhine only to be captured by a German patrol and incarcerated in a temporary holding centre in a large house at Velp to the east of Arnhem, where he hid in a cupboard from 23 September until 4 October, at which time the Germans abandoned the house. Deane-Drummond then made contact with the Dutch Resistance and played a leading role in gathering and co-ordinating the activities of the Airborne evaders.57 Buoyed by the success of Operation PEGASUS, a second large-scale evacuation was planned for the night of 18-19 November, code-named, logically enough, Operation PEGASUS II. Led by Major Hugh Maguire, an Intelligence Officer from the 1st Airborne Division Staff, the second effort involved around 130 men including a larger proportion of Dutch civilians and non-Airborne personnel. Matters did not proceed as planned. The evaders ran into a German artillery position en route to the river and lost a number of men killed, wounded or recaptured, and a German patrol stumbled upon the evacuation in progress when it finally went ahead, possibly over two nights; two more evaders were killed, one of them Major John Coke from the 7th KOSB, and the remainder were obliged to scatter after only seven men had crossed the river to safety.58 There were no more large-scale efforts thereafter and the Dutch Resistance smuggled the evaders out of German-held territory on an individual or small group basis, with preference given to doctors, Glider Pilots, soldiers and airmen in that order; as we have seen, they included Brigadier Hackett and Colonel Warrack.59 According to Urquhart they were carried to safety via canoe, a means used with some success by the Dutch Resistance, with the Allied units on the south bank of the Lower Rhine being briefed to look out for the flimsy craft; Hackett was greeted on the riverbank by an officer from the 11th Hussars bearing a celebratory bottle of brandy.60

  The second piece of unfinished business was the hanging out to dry of Major-General Stanislaw Sosabowski and, by extension, his men of the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade. While the survivors of the 1st Airborne Division were being feted, fed and permitted to rest in the reception centre in Nijmegen and then repatriated to Britain, their equally battle-worn Polish counterparts had been assigned further duties in Holland. A Warning Order from Browning’s Forward Airborne Corps HQ had been received by the Polish Brigade at 12:00 on Monday 25 September, ordering it to march to Nijmegen the following day for reassignment.61 The Poles duly left Driel as ordered at 09:00 on Tuesday 26 September in numerical order by Battalion in pouring rain and under heavy German artillery and mortar fire that inflicted further casualties, before arriving at the Nijmegen bridges at 15:00.62 Major-General Sosabowski had gone ahead to Browning’s HQ to receive his orders in person, where he fell asleep after being left waiting. In the brief interview that eventually followed, Sosabowski gave Browning the losses his Brigade had suffered since arriving in Holland, which totalled 342 casualties, twenty-three per cent of the Brigade’s Officers and twenty-two per cent of the Other Ranks; Browning responded by assuring the Polish commander that his formation would be withdrawn to Britain as soon as possible but that the gravity of the situation required their continued presence in Holland. He then handed Sosabowski over to a staff officer who informed the Polish commander that his unit was to be employed in guarding temporary airfields near Neerloon, ten miles west of Nijmegen, and providing lines-of-communication security; to add insult to injury, the Poles were to be subordinate to Brigadier J. D. Russell’s 157 Brigade, the sea tail of the 52nd Lowland Division, which was originally to have been flown into Deelen airfield as a rapid reinforcement for the 1st Airborne Division. Transport was provided to carry the Poles out to their new home at 18:30, with Brigade HQ in Neerloon and the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Battalions billeted in the nearby villages of Herpen, Ravenstein and Overlangel respectively.63 There they remained until 7 October 1944 when they were trucked in the wake of their British counterparts to Louvain. Part of the Brigade was then flown back to Britain from Brussels airport in small groups when spare aircraft capacity could be found, until the Poles’ air priority was rescinded on 10 October. The remainder of the Brigade then began moving by road to Ostend at 03:40, where they were reunited with the Brigade’s sea tail and then shipped back in Battalion increments aboard four landing ships over the next few days. The final increment docked at Tilbury at 02:00 on 15 October 1944.64

  Unsurprisingly, Major-General Sosabowski did not take his latest humiliation lying down and immediately on arriving at Neerloon he formally requested Browning in writing that he be released from subordination to command of 157 Brigade due to the organisation of his unit and ‘seniority of rank’. Browning replied justifying the matter by pointing to Polish losses and alleged disorganisation, and the fact that 157 Brigade ‘badly needed a reserve’ in case of emergency but sweetened the pill by agreeing to the Polish Brigade reverting to British Airborne Corps command ‘with effect from 08:00 hrs. 29th Sept’. The Poles were nonetheless to ‘maintain present dispositions and tasks, working in very close liaison with 157 Inf. Bde’.65 Sosabowski certainly viewed the episode as a deliberate slight, but appears to have been more concerned at the possibility of his formation losing its independence and being co-opted by the British for use as regular line infantry; he specifically raised this concern with the Polish liaison officer attached to 21st Army Group HQ when the latter visited Neerloon.66 This episode was surely a continuation of the treatment meted out to Sosabowski at the Valburg Conference on 24 September, and subsequent events were to confirm that this was part of a deliberate strategy to shift the blame for the failure of MARKET GARDEN away from the British high command onto the hapless Poles, Sosabowski in particular.

  On 7 October 1944 Montgomery criticised the Polish Brigade for being unwilling to take risks, complained that it had performed extremely poorly at Driel and demanded it be removed from his command in a letter to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), Field-Marshal Sir Alan Brooke.67 On 18 November, Browning accepted the Order of Polonia Restituta at the Polish GHQ in the Hotel Reubens in London in recognition of his assistance in the establishment of the Polish Parachute Brigade, a process in which he played a marginal role at best. Two days later, he sent a letter to the Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Weeks, claiming that Sosabowski had been incapable of grasping the urgency of the situation at Driel, that he had been needlessly argumentative and unwilling to obey orders, and cited Horrocks and Thomas as witnesses to these and other misdemeanours. It ended by recommending that Sosabowski be removed from command of the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade because of his temperament and inability to co-operate.68 A copy of the letter was forwarded to Montgomery and another to the Polish Chief-of-Staff in London, General Stanislaw Kopanski; Kopanski passed his copy to Sosabowski at a meeting on 2 December 1944 and asked him for suggestions for service away from the Parachute Brigade. Sosabowski responded by calling for an examination of his conduct as an officer and commander and for Kopanski’s backing, and was granted an audience with Polish President-in-Exile Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz on 7 December 1944. The President assured Sosabowski that his conduct had been exemplary, but pointed out that he and General Kopanski could see no option but to comply with the British request for political reasons. Major-General Stanislaw Sosabowski was therefore relieved of command of the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade on 9 December with effect from 27 December 1944. His soldiers, unaware of the political machinations behind the removal, were reportedly stunned and the 2nd Battalion and Engineer Company based at Wansford and the 3rd Battalion at Peterborough refused to enter their cook houses in protest; Sosabowski defused the situation by inviting them to eat with him and made his final address to the Brigade at Wansford on 27 December.69

  The fact that the Polish Brigade lost a quarter of its strength including ninety-two dea
d clearly shows there was no substance to any of this. Furthermore, in an interview with Cholewczynski forty-four years after the event, Major-General Urquhart roundly praised the Polish paratroopers in a manner that also gives the lie to the allegations: ‘I could not fault them for co-operation. I never had any worries about that. Everything I asked was done, unless there was a very good reason.’70 There was also the fact that Sosabowski had been deliberately lied to by British 1st Airborne Corps HQ on 21 September over possession of the north end of the Heveadorp ferry before he and the bulk of his men were dropped blind onto an unsurveyed and unsecured landing zone. That aside, as Montgomery did not visit Driel during the battle he had no first-hand knowledge on which to base his claims that the Poles had performed poorly and he must therefore have been informed second-hand by Horrocks and Browning; his motivation for involvement in the collective scapegoating of the Poles was presumably an attempt to deflect some of the blame for the failure of MARKET GARDEN. Similarly, the hostile treatment meted out to Sosabowski at Valburg by Horrocks and Thomas was also based on second-hand knowledge, and their motivation for scapegoating the Polish commander was to distract attention from the poor performance of 30 Corps and its constituent formations, which was the primary reason for the failure of the GARDEN ground force to relieve the MARKET Airborne force in a timely manner, and thus for the failure of the operation as a whole. Browning’s motivation in the pillorying of Sosabowski was more personal and straightforward, and was primarily because the Polish commander had been a long-standing obstacle to Browning’s ambitions. Sosabowski had repeatedly rebuffed Browning’s attempts to absorb the Polish Parachute Brigade into his Airborne fief from as far back as September 1941.71 More recently he had publicly and repeatedly pointed out the flaws in the plans for Operation COMET and Operation MARKET GARDEN, the means by which Browning intended to cement his increasingly shaky place in the Allied Airborne Pantheon; most unforgivably of all (to Browning), events proved Sosabowski to be right on the money. The scapegoating of Sosabowski and his men was a spiteful, unwarranted and unforgivable slur on a competent and conscientious commander whose only crime was to refuse to play Whitehall politics to Browning’s satisfaction, and upon a courageous body of men whose only failing was an inability to walk on water. It is therefore difficult to disagree with Middlebrook’s view that the episode was ‘a shameful act by the British commanders’.72