Arnhem

by William F Buckingham

  All this was exacerbated by Lathbury’s tendencies toward autocratic leadership and micromanagement. Lathbury was responsible for the delay in his Brigade leaving the landing area because he deliberately held it back while all the motorised support elements were gathered in, although to be fair this may have been a reaction to his experience in Sicily. Whether or not, from virtually the instant the Brigade moved off Lathbury busied himself motoring between his units harassing his subordinate commanders for greater haste. He virtually took control of the 3rd Parachute Battalion over the shoulder of its commander, peremptorily ordering a Platoon attack that cost needless casualties and caused needless delay, and then brought the 3rd Parachute Battalion’s advance to a halt for the night after Urquhart arrived at its location on the western outskirts of Oosterbeek, an action which his Brigade Major later pinpointed as the point where the Brigade’s mission, and by extension that of the 1st Airborne Division, failed. Thereafter, Lathbury reverted to being a virtual observer to proceedings, passively accompanying his equally inert Division commander with the 3rd Parachute Battalion column until he was seriously wounded in an ill-conceived attempt to rejoin his Brigade in the late afternoon of Monday 18 September. It is perhaps instructive to note that the elements of the 1st Parachute Brigade that reached the Arnhem road bridge or made the most progress toward it did so without the benefit of Lathbury’s direct involvement.

  The bulk of the responsibility for what befell the 1st Airborne Division, however, lay at the top with Major-General Urquhart, largely owing to his total lack of operational Airborne experience. On the plus side, there is no evidence Urquhart sought the appointment. He made a good impression on his new command as well as identifying some of its flaws, and his ability to get to grips satisfactorily with his new role in the months between assuming command and MARKET GARDEN was severely constrained initially by the widely dispersed nature of his command, the bout of malaria that hospitalised him in April and May 1944, and then by being obliged to attend the constant round of planning meetings for the series of fifteen aborted operations the 1st Airborne Division was slated for in the run-up to MARKET. The evidence nonetheless shows that his grasp of the realities of Airborne operations in comparison to conventional ground operations was less than optimal, and he does not seem to have properly understood that Airborne operations were and are frequently affairs that require the force involved to be tailored to the specific mission, and do not automatically require the entire panoply of Division and support elements to be deployed as a matter of course; had he been more practised, Urquhart might have sought to restrict his first lift to infantry, anti-tank and possibly artillery elements, as did the more operationally experienced US Airborne Division commanders. This would in turn have reduced the need to remain in place to protect the landing area for subsequent lifts, although this would also almost certainly have provoked a likely unwinnable conflict with the RAF planners. That aside, the tenuousness of Urquhart’s grasp was apparent in his acquiescing to Browning’s appropriation of gliders to cut into the already stretched infantry component of the first lift when Divisional or HQ elements could have been trimmed instead, and in his failure to clarify the succession of Division command until virtually on the steps of his Horsa and ensure his wishes were disseminated and acknowledged by his senior commanders. The potentially serious repercussions of this on the ground in Holland were only offset by the diplomatic skills of his Operations Officer Lieutenant-Colonel Mackenzie and because Brigadiers Hackett and Hicks were willing to put aside the personal for the greater good.

  While Urquhart’s lack of experience and understanding are mitigating factors and go some way to explaining his behaviour, they do not absolve him of responsibility for the string of poor and potentially fatal decisions he made in the initial stages of Operation MARKET, beginning with his precipitate reactions to rumours about the non-arrival of the 1st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron that he made no real effort to verify, apart from summoning the Reconnaissance Squadron commander to Division HQ to clarify the matter. This led to the abandonment of the Squadron’s supposedly vital coup-de-main mission and also suggests that Urquhart was viewing the matters through the prism of his conventional operational experience, given that it potentially involved Major Gough motoring back and forth across miles of enemy-held territory. Urquhart then left his HQ on the landing area to inform Lathbury of the supposed non-arrival of the Reconnaissance Squadron in person, leaving no word of where he was going or how he could be reached, in the process severed his link to his HQ by having his signaller retune the Jeep-mounted radio; it can argued that at this point he effectively abdicated command of the 1st Airborne Division. On finding Lathbury with the 3rd Parachute Battalion column near Oosterbeek, Urquhart chose to remain there, prompting Lathbury to halt that unit for the night. He then accompanied the 3rd Battalion column ‒ still out of contact with his HQ and by his own admission as little more than a passive observer ‒ into the western outskirts of Arnhem, where an attempt to regain his HQ ended with him trapped in an attic with a German armoured vehicle parked outside the front door. There he remained for twelve hours before finally regaining Division HQ at 07:25 on Tuesday 19 September after a forty-hour absence, during which the 1st Airborne Division had been blocked from its primary mission and compelled to fight for its life. Simply put, Urquhart did not make a single correct decision in his first two days on the ground in Holland, and this only changed when the battle switched from an Airborne assault to a conventional defensive infantry battle, where he performed creditably, especially in drawing up and executing the withdrawal across the Lower Rhine. He was demonstrably out of his depth in the initial stages of Operation MARKET and his virtual abandonment of his men on reaching the south bank of the Lower Rhine in order to report to Browning casts additional doubt on his judgement. That aside, the fault for all this lay not solely with the hapless Urquhart but also with Montgomery and Browning, for placing patronage above experience and proven competence when making high-level command appointments.

  It only remains to deliver a verdict on whether MARKET GARDEN was feasible and worth the potential cost in men and materiel. It has become received wisdom that the operation was a lost cause doomed from the outset and by extension a convenient stick with which to beat Montgomery; it is often overlooked that British and US Airborne Forces were established and configured precisely to carry out these kinds of missions and, perhaps more relevantly, that the Germans had successfully prosecuted something very similar to MARKET GARDEN in May 1940. More importantly, while it is doubtful whether success would have led to the grand strategic stroke Montgomery envisaged, if only because Eisenhower was unlikely to have been willing or indeed able to allot the necessary resources, the evidence does not really support this negative verdict. Rather, it can be convincingly argued that MARKET GARDEN could well have achieved all its objectives if only because ‒ despite all the bad luck, coincidences and errors ‒ it was such a close-run thing. Despite its leisurely advance and concomitant lack of urgency, 30 Corps and specifically the Guards Armoured Division still came within a few miles of the Arnhem road bridge while Frost’s men were still holding out. Had the Guards Armoured moved with more despatch from the beginning and kept to the set timetable as ordered, and had Gavin been permitted to secure the Nijmegen bridges at the outset as he originally intended, then 30 Corps ought to have been able to reach the Arnhem road bridge by midnight on 20 September, even allowing for the destruction of the Son bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal. On the Lower Rhine, approximately 740 Airborne soldiers from a variety of units, accompanied by numerous vehicles and guns, covered the seven miles or so from the landing area to the north end of the Arnhem road bridge in under six hours, and then held onto their foothold for eighty hours before being overwhelmed. With a more workable plan, less interference and more haste the 1st Parachute Brigade in its entirety might well have reached the road bridge, and a force around three times larger than Frost’s on the objective would have permitted
a larger and thus more defensible perimeter. All success required was a very slight shift in fortune and a similarly slight change in the congruence of factors, because the margin between success and failure really was that narrow.

  1. A ‘blizzard of silk’; C-47s from the US 61st and 314th Troop Carrier Groups delivering 2,278 men from the 1st Parachute Brigade onto DZ X north of Heelsum in the afternoon of Sunday 17 September 1944.

  2. Some of the 150 gliders delivered onto LZ Z by aircraft from RAF Nos. 38 & 46 Groups on the afternoon of Sunday 17 September 1944 scattered across the north-east corner of the landing zone. Most are Airspeed Horsas but three of the larger General Aircraft Hamilcars with a payload of over seven tons can be seen to the right of the white building; four of the thirteen Hamilcars in the first lift suffered serious landing accidents, two due to the soft soil.

  3. The view today across Ginkel Heath or DZ Y looking south from the Amsterdamseweg and Zuid Ginkel café where the 4th Parachute Brigade dropped as part of the 1st Airborne Division’s second lift in the afternoon of Monday 18 September 1944. The Brigade dropped into a fierce battle between the 7th Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers, which had been tasked to hold the DZ, and SS Wacht Battalion 3 and the unexpected arrival of c. 2,000 paratroopers caused the SS unit to break and scatter in confusion.

  4. Heavily laden US paratroopers pose on the steps of a C-47 prior to take-off.

  5. British Glider infantrymen, possibly from the 1st Airlanding Brigade, wearing their distinctive maroon berets, camouflaged Denison Smocks and carrying their Airborne pattern helmets pose for the camera.

  6. A 20mm flak gun at the German barrier defences in Arnhem.

  7. A 3-inch mortar crew from the 1st Battalion The Border Regiment during the fighting on the west side of the Oosterbeek Perimeter. The crew are, from left to right, Private McDowell, Corporal Tierney & Corporal Knight.

  8. ‘An ambitious and manipulative empire-building bureaucrat par excellence’: Lieutenant-General Frederick Arthur Montague Browning, Commander of the British 1st Airborne Corps and Deputy Commander of the 1st Allied Airborne Army.

  9. Major-General Roy Urquhart, Commander of the British 1st Airborne Division, at the rear of the Hotel Hartenstein which served as his HQ for the bulk of the Battle of Arnhem. Note the Airborne trailer at the extreme right and the maroon and light blue Pegasus Divisional Pennant flying from the lance to Urquhart’s right; the Pennant was removed from the lance and carried across the Lower Rhine by Urquhart’s batman, a Private Hancock, on the night of 25–26 September 1944.

  10. The Hotel Hartenstein today. It now houses the Airborne Museum ‘Hartenstein’ dedicated to the Battle of Arnhem.

  11. Paratroopers from the US 82nd Airborne Division, possibly from the 2nd Battalion 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, stand guard over wounded German prisoners at the south end of the Nijmegen road bridge.

  12. The Stadtkommandant of Arnhem, Generalmajor Friedrich Kussin, who was killed along with his batman and driver in the late afternoon of Sunday 17 September 1944. Kussin had been conferring with Hauptsturmführer Sepp Krafft at the Hotel Wolfheze and appears to have been returning to his HQ in Arnhem when his camouflaged Citroën saloon ran into Lieutenant James Cleminson’s 5 Platoon from the 3rd Parachute Battalion at the junction of the Utrechtseweg and Wolfhezeweg.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Patrol member names cited in Stephen Ambrose, Band of Brothers, pp.160-161

  2. Dobie’s forename is missing and his surname is misspelled ‘Dobey’ in the 101st Airborne Division’s semi-official history and the error is repeated in Ambrose’s account; the latter also uniquely dubs him ‘The Mad Colonel of Arnhem’; see Leonard Rapport and Arthur Northwood Jr., Rendezvous with Destiny, p.400; and Ambrose, p.160

  3. For details see for example Martin Middlebrook, Arnhem 1944: The Airborne Battle, pp.190-199

  4. Details from Rapport & Northwood, p.400

  5. The precise number and makeup of the PEGASUS evaders varies between sources; see Middlebrook, p.438; Rapport & Northwood, p.401; and David Truesdale, Brotherhood of the Cauldron, p.161

  6. See Truesdale, p.161

  7. See Ambrose, pp.161-162

  8. Ambrose and Truesdale refer to the operation beginning at or shortly after midnight, whereas Rapport & Northwood refer to 01:00; see Ambrose, p.161; Truesdale, p.161; and Rapport & Northwood, p.400

  9. See Rapport and Northwood, p.400

  10. See Middlebrook, p.438

  Chapter 1

  1. See David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent, Briton Defies Doubters to Pilot Parachute Designed in 1485, Daily Telegraph, 19 April 2001 at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1345122/Briton-defies-doubters-to-pilot-parachute-designed-in-1485.html, accessed 26/09/2008

  2. See Aislinn Simpson, Leonardo da Vinci Parachute from 1485 Finally has Successful Landing, Daily Telegraph, 28 April 2008 at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1905000/Leonardo-da-Vinci-parachute-from-1485-finally-has-successful-landing.html, accessed 26/09/2008

  3. Quoted in Michael Hickey, Out of the Sky: A History of Airborne Warfare, p.9

  4. See John Terraine, The Right of the Line, p.669

  5. See Gerard M. Devlin, Paratrooper!, pp.3-7

  6. See Devlin, pp.8-14

  7. See Lee Kennett, The First Air War 1914-1918, p.46

  8. See John H. Morrow, The Great War in the Air, p.239

  9. Sometimes rendered Heinicke

  10. For a picture of the Henecke harness see Peter Kilduff, Germany’s First Air Force 1914-1918, p.13

  11. See Devlin, p.21

  12. See Bruce Quarrie, Airborne Assault: Parachute Forces in Action 1940-1991 pp.26-28

  13. See Quarrie, p.28

  14. See Roderick Grant & Christopher Cole, But Not In Anger: The RAF in the Transport Role, pp.16-17

  15. See Sir Walter Raleigh and H. A. Jones, The War in the Air, Volume V, pp.278-280; and Grant & Cole, pp.7-14

  16. See Grant & Cole, pp.14-16, 208

  17. See Vernon Blunt, The Use of Airpower, pp.168-169

  18. Quoted from Maurice Tugwell, Airborne to Battle: A History of Airborne Warfare 1918-1971, p.18

  19. See Lt. Col. James A. Bassett, ‘Past Airborne Employment’, Journal of Military History, Volume 12, No. 4, Winter 1948, pp.206-207

  20. See David M. Glantz, The History of Soviet Airborne Forces, pp.4-12

  21. See for example F. O. Miksche, Paratroops: The History, Organisation and Tactical Use of Airborne Formations, p.22

  22. See AIR 5/1253 Operations: Iraq, Chapters 1 to 13, 1918-1924; and Grant & Cole, pp.54-66, 80-83

  23. See David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919 – 1939, p.72

  24. See Captain R.G. Thorburn, ‘The Operations in South Kurdistan, March-May 1923’, The Army Quarterly, Volume 31 (October 1935-January 1936), p.270

  25. See Grant & Cole, pp.80-83

  26. See Grant & Cole, pp.91-94

  27. See Thorburn, p.275

  28. See Grant & Cole, pp.56, 71-80, 91-99

  29. See for example British Military Policy Between the Two World Wars, pp.24-25, 33

  30. See John Kennedy, The Business of War: The War Narrative of Major-General Sir John Kennedy, p.xv

  31. For aircraft details see Owen Thetford, Aircraft of the Royal Air Force Since 1918, pp.28-33, 136-137, 289-291, 513-514, 519-520

  32. For details see Devlin, pp.23-26

  33. For a contemporary reference, see ‘Notes of the Week’, The United Services Review, (16 June 1938), p.3; and Lieutenant-Colonel T.B.H. Otway, Airborne Forces, pp.16-17

  34. Basmachi: Russian slang term for a brigand or raider, the activities of which were and remain endemic in Central Asia

  35. See A. Borisov, ‘Desant onto the Sand in Aircraft’, Vestnik vozdushnovo flota (January 1929) pp.11-13; for a less detailed contemporary account that may well be describing the same operation see A. N. Lapchinskiy ‘Airborne Landings’, Voyna i Revolyutsiya (1930) Book 6, as pr
inted in A. B. Kadishev (Ed) Voprosy Taktiki v Sovetskih Voyennykh Trudakh 1917-1940 (Moscow: Voyenizdat, 1970), pp.348-354: cited in H.F. Scott and W.F. Scott (Eds.), The Soviet Art of War, pp.64-65. I am indebted to Dr James Sterrett for locating and translating the Borisov article