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| © Simon Poulter 2018 |
73 years after the end of World War Two, the events of those six gruesome years continue to hold an unbreakable fascination. The conflict began less than two decades after the bloodletting of the First World War, and yet in those intervening years warfare had progressed from biplanes to the Spitfire. But as much as World War One was and still is defined by its industrial levels of human slaughter, World War Two wasn’t without death on a similarly massive scale, not least of which, of course, because of the Holocaust and the Nazi oppression of Europe. In fact, there is a common misbelief that because the Second World War wasn’t fought trench-to-trench in the same way as its predecessor that it was only prosecuted from safe distances. It wasn’t. One such example was a battle that took place relatively late in the war and which, had it gone to plan, was even designed to end the conflict by Christmas 1944. That battle was for the Dutch city of Arnhem.
By the time of D-Day on 6 June, 1944, the war had been turning in the Allies’ favour. D-Day itself had been, in the grand scheme of things, a success - from the Allied deception that led Hitler to be convinced an invasion would take place around Calais, to the relative ease with which the Allies broke out of Normandy once landed. But with this success came hubris. Such was the pace of progress over the summer of 1944 that many in the high command thought that the taking of Berlin was already in sight. How wrong they were. And how much worse was to come.
The over-extended belief in, at least reaching into the Ruhr region by the beginning of winter was fuelled partly by the archly competitive nature of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery - Monty - and his boss, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander. Monty had ridden a long wave of success, from the Western Desert and El Alamein in 1942, through the invasions of Sicily and Italy in 1943, and then to D-Day itself, when he was in overall command of all Allied ground forces. With Normandy secured and progress already being made into France towards Paris, Monty took it upon himself to push for a thrust into Belgium and the Netherlands as the route into Germany. His American rivals, notably General Omar Bradley, favoured a southern ‘punch. Eisenhower indulged his rival generals, something that may not have been the wisest.
However, trouble was laying in wait. Arnhem - the furthest north of the three target cities - was only believed to be lightly defended (by “old men and boys on bicycles”). The reality was somewhat different. The Germans had stationed, around Arnhem and between it and Nijmegen, units of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions. Intelligence reports from the Dutch underground and from RAF reconnaissance flights had even suggested that German armour was hidden around Arnhem, but the s was dismissed as ‘probably nothing’. So when, on Sunday, 17 September, 1944 - 74 years ago today - 10,000 paratroopers of the British 1st Airborne landed by parachute and by glider in the woods of Oosterbeek, a three-and-a-half-mile march into Arnhem itself (which sounds short, but was anything but), and met no resistance, it was assumed that the dismissal of intelligence by high command was warranted.
The Germans had, however, other ideas. Field Marshal Walter Model, one of Hitler's most senior officers, had been at Oosterbeek only a matter of hours before the landings began, and had already predicted the invasion based on intelligence chatter. While the 1st Airborne were marching towards Arnhem and, in particular, its bridge, Model’s crack Panzer troops, supported by relatively fresh-off-the-line tanks and heavy armour, were being organised to counter-attack the invaders. When they did, they began six days of the bloodiest fighting seen in World War Two, with the British-led invasion force hampered by poor (if not non-existent) radio communications and by resupply drops which ended up delivering vital ammunition, food and medical supplies behind German lines.
From the force who’d landed at Oosterbeek, a detachment of British Paras led by Lt. Colonel John Frost reached Arnhem and took up position at the northern end of the Rhine bridge. Model mobilised his 2nd SS Panzer Corps under the battle-hardened General Wilhelm Bittrich to attack, unleashing an astonishing barrage in an attempt to demoralise and flush out Frost's troops. Over the next few days, the British Paras fought on bravely - sometimes with just their bayonets - but dwindling in number as casualties mounted up. By the fifth morning those who were left - the injured and those who had volunteered to fight on to protect the injured - were taken prisoner. A final message - transmitted by one of the few working radios in British possession - said, simply: "Out of ammo, God save the King". Arnhem had become a bridge too far.
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| © Simon Poulter 2018 |
Although some 2500 Paras managed to get out of Arnhem, 1500 were killed and a further 6000 taken prisoner, including Frost. Today the bridge is named the John Frostbrug in tribute to the plucky British colonel who, with his huntsman's horn, gathered his troops with rifles and machine guns to take on some of the most powerful weapons in the German army, commanded not by old men and boys, but by elite soldiers.
Relief had, however, meant to have come within just two days from 30 Corps - under the command of the charismatic General Brian Horrocks (portrayed with equal charisma by Edward Fox in Richard Attenborough’s star-studded 1977 blockbuster adapted from Cornelius Ryan’s authentic book, A Bridge Too Far). Horrocks’ column of tanks were expected to race up the main road that linked Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem: today, the journey takes just over an hour, courtesy of the fast, dual-carriageway A50 motorway. In September 1944, the cities were linked by a single-carriageway road which, like many Dutch provincial highways was flanked by canals. This meant that sholud a tank get hit by enemy fire or, simply, breakdown, removing it was highly time consuming. The Dutch underground had warned the British leadership about this risk, but still, it continued with the plan to send Horrocks’ tanks that way in order to support the airborne troops (in years to come, what would become known as ‘Hell’s Highway’ would become the subject of tactical lessons in military staff colleges the world over).
With characteristic attention to minutiae and his usual breathtaking depth of research, Beevor paints an appropriately unsympathetic picture of the flawed planning and debilitating politics that, ultimately, hampered Operations Market and Garden, and which made some aspects unnecessarily clumsy, and others an executional disaster.
If you’ve ever read Ryan’s book or seen the Attenborough film, Beevor’s Arnhem will add several layers deeper of the personalities involved, the operations themselves, the attrition of Colonel John Frost’s brave men defending the Arnhem bridge for days longer than they were expected to, the high rates of casualties on both sides and, critically, the violent reprisals carried out by the Germans on the local Dutch population in the aftermath of, ultimately, this British defeats (it wasn’t until the 1960s that Arnhem had finished rebuilding itself and the houses and properties burned, often with residents still hiding in cellars, in retaliation for helping the Allied forces they had hoped and even assumed would be liberating them).
During my time living in the Netherlands I visited the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Oosterbeek every so often for reflection. Each September, at this time, local school children stage a remembrance ceremony in honour of the British, Canadian and American forces who landed nearby on 17 September and fought for over a week to get out to safety. Oosterbeek contains the final resting places of almost 1800 casualties of the battle for Arnhem. An eerie calm pervades the well-tended rows of headstones in the cemetery, set in a deeply wooded area. The graves provide a thought-provoking timeline of the battle - the dates 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25 September: nine consecutive days of attrition - while the ages: 17, 20, 21, 25, 30… - and English, Welsh and Polish names, the occasional Star of David, as well as every conceivable rank and duty from officers to glider pilots, cooks to medical orderlies, tell another story.
Operation Market Garden, in total, cost the lives of several thousand Allied soldiers and a large but undetermined number of German troops. More than 500 Dutch locals were killed in the fighting. The Dutch population paid a terrible price in the winter that followed, as the Nazis tried to starve the Netherlands in the hope that it would capitulate further and give Germany one last stronghold outside of the fatherland. 20,000 Dutch starved to death in the winter of 1944, which was particularly gruelling.
The annual commemoration at Oosterbeek is as much a gesture of gratitude towards those who died in vein trying to liberate Arnhem as it is a reminder of the terrible suffering the Dutch continued to experience long after other parts of Europe had been declare free of the Nazi tyranny. It would be another eight months after the battle before the war in Europe would finally come to an end, and almost an entire year before atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would bring World War Two to a complete stop. Arnhem, in particular, serves to remind us that this war was bitter, right up until the end.
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