by Geert Mak
Winrich Behr spent days driving with Rommel along the Normandy fronts. ‘I was twenty-six at the time, he was around fifty-five, and he was like a father to me.’ According to Behr, Rommel was actually a very down-to-earth man. ‘He said what was on his mind. “Hitler expects us to advance! Things can't go on like this!” he would say sometimes. But then he would come back a little later and say: “Well, Behr, we mustn't forget, Adolf Hitler is a great man.” Then he would sleep on it a night, and the next morning he would say: “What a terrible person, what a windbag!” And he would pound his fists on his stomach in rage.’
Rommel, Behr believed, was not in favour of assassinating Hitler. ‘He wanted the whole clique to be imprisoned, taken to trial, anything, but murder them, no. It wasn't in him to be a Brutus. But, like most of the other generals, he wanted peace to come quickly. The fatherland had to be saved. In that sense he saw himself as a second Hindenburg, who had played a conciliatory role after the First World War. After all, both friend and foe saw Rommel as a respectable German, and he knew that.’
To the east of Germany, the second great European front congealed. On 22 June, 1944, a little more than two weeks after D-Day, the Soviets began their own counteroffensive. Operation Bagration has been allocated only a tiny role in Western textbooks, but was at least as decisive as Normandy for the outcome of the war. The senior German command was once more taken unawares. They had been expecting the next great offensive to take place along the Black Sea, with the oilfields of Pripet and Ploieşs as prizes. But now the fronts were suddenly moving towards the Baltic States, East Prussia, Poland, and ultimately towards Germany itself.
The size of the Soviet force came as such a shock that Hitler, like Stalin in 1941, at first refused to believe the reports: 166 divisions, 30,000 cannons, mortars and rocket launchers, 4,000 tanks, 6,000 planes. The Soviets had twice as many soldiers as the Germans, almost three times as many cannons and mortars, and more than four times as many tanks and planes. The Russian ‘steamroller’, once a favourite source of speculation by paranoid military officers, had become reality.
Once Germany was caught between these two enemy armies, things went quickly. After the breakthrough of the Allied forces in Normandy, the Germans – as someone wrote later – ‘started losing faster than the Allies could win’. The Allied Western offensive, however, soon ‘choked on its own success’: the supply lines from Normandy became overex-tended. Despite the Pluto pipeline and the thousands of Red Ball Express trucks driving bumper to bumper, supplies grew short. On the evening of 2 September, the advance positions bogged down. A few American Sherman tanks drove up the hill at the Belgian town of Tournai, but instead of entering the city they ground to a halt: out of fuel. A few more Shermans came up from behind and had just enough fuel to reach the centre of the town before their own engines sputtered and died.
‘My men can eat their belts,’ General Patton thundered, ‘but my tanks gotta have gas!’ The fuel crisis spread like wildfire. Only four days later were the tanks able to roll out of Tournai. At Brussels they were forced to spend another idle day. In Limburg Province they were still able to shoot, but not to advance. The Siegfried Line and the German border lay just over the horizon. In the Dutch cities, ‘Crazy Tuesday’ arrived on 5 September: in a panic, collaborators and German officials packed their bags and fled east. Victory seemed close at hand.
The Allied leaders were ecstatic as well, and that resulted in an understandable, but fatal, error of judgement. The British had taken Antwerp, but that did not mean they could use the port: the banks of the River Scheldt were still firmly in German hands. But after all, if the war would be over by winter anyway – and even the cautious Eisenhower was counting on that – there was no need to liberate the port of Antwerp. Commander G. P. B. Roberts of the British 11th Tank Division waited in vain for orders to deal with the German 15th Army which had fled to the Dutch island of Walcheren. Almost 80,000 Germans escaped in the meantime, and in the weeks that followed they had all the time they needed to throw up a strong line of defence. For months they were able to block all shipments along the Antwerp route.
By the time the Allies became bogged down along the Rhine a few weeks later, it was too late. Antwerp's was the only harbour suitable for the short-distance supply of munitions, supplies and fuel for an army of several million troops, but the River Scheldt had been skilfully blockaded. The mistake could only be set right by a second storming of the Atlantic Wall at Flushing and Westkapelle, in late October 1944. According to the commandos involved, that landing was more treacherous than the one at Normandy. Landing craft were shelled and burned while still at sea, the water was icy, and the troops hit the beach unprotected from the ‘most concentrated barrage of fire in the world’. More than 17,000 Britons, Canadians, Norwegians, French and Poles were wounded in the battle for the Scheldt, more than 6,000 were killed.
In a display case in the Cabinet War Rooms in London hangs a dog-eared map of Europe, taped to a hinged plank with a black tarpaulin around it, covered with sheets of tracing paper full of lines and notes. It is the political map Churchill used during the war. The remarkable thing is that those scratchings already trace the fault lines which were to divide the continent for more than forty years, and which were based in part on the front lines as they were in winter 1944–5.
During the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviet troops were on the Weichsel, the Allies on the Rhine. In February 1945, the American Shermans were still in almost the same positions where they had become stuck in September 1944. Meanwhile the Soviets had taken Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary and part of Czechoslovakia, and by early 1945 they had reached the Oder. They were poised to enter Berlin. The delay in the West and those lines drawn at Yalta had much, if not everything, to do with Antwerp and Walcheren.
Normandy and Omaha Beach have been brought back to the public eye by Steven Spielberg's D-Day film Saving Private Ryan. Yet at Flushing and Westkapelle, the pennants of the herring boats flap in the wind as though nothing ever happened. The Allied campaign of 1944 can now be driven across in a day. After Antwerp it starts to rain, on Walcheren the water blows in waves across the road. The names of the villages I drive through in Zeeland Province remind me of the staunch radio voices of the 1950s, of my parents’ worried faces as they huddled near the set, of the preachers who spoke of ‘the punitive breath of God’ moving over the precious, ‘worldly’ Netherlands, of the two Dinky toys I had to offer up to the poor, drowned children.
The years 1944 and 1953 are chiselled in stone everywhere in the cemeteries here. Flushing, along with Rotterdam and Venlo the most heavily bombed cities in the Netherlands: more than 250 graves, plus a section full of Britons, Canadians, Poles and Australians. Westkapelle: forty-four victims from just one bombed cellar beneath an old mill. Oude Tonge: about 300 graves, all bearing the date 1 February, 1953. Nieuwerkerk: ‘Maria van Klinken, born 1951, missing’, the rest of the family dead as well. Hundreds of family dramas lie buried here amid the clumps of clay.
First there were the May days of 1940 and the bombardment of Middelburg – after the Dutch capitulated, the French and the Belgians fought on bitterly in Zeeland Province – then, on 3 October, 1944, the Allies inundated Walcheren to drive out the Germans. Then came the battle for Walcheren, and less than ten years later, on 1 February, 1953, this piece of the Netherlands – with the exception of Walcheren, this time – was once again swallowed up by the sea with the loss of 1,836 lives.
The sea dyke at Westkapelle was bombed by the Allies in 1944 to smoke out the German positions, and the survivors always finish their accounts with the line: ‘And then we found ourselves staring right into the sea.’ I can see the present-day dyke down at the end of the main street, higher than the newest houses, and I can imagine how terrifying that breach must have been for those who lived there below sea level. In the churchyard lie the victims of all the bombs that went astray, ten per cent of the village population then. No one talks about it now
.
Flushing, too, has girded itself against God's wrath with order and technology. A downpour races along the boulevard, a man in a bronze oilskin tries to light a cigarette in the lee of it, behind the windows of Strandveste the elderly take shelter in their apartments. Just past the city lies the tidiest beach in Europe, a row of locked bathing cubicles, a sign saying ‘Surveillance’, a long line of rubbish bins, and not a soul in sight.
But still, I am walking along the most important European battlefield of autumn 1944, a normal stretch of coastline that once, briefly, was what it was all about.
Chapter FORTY-FIVE
Oosterbeek
WHAT IF D-DAY HAD FAILED? OR WHAT IF, IN 1931, A NEW YORK taxi driver had not just clipped the fat man crossing the street, but killed him? Or if the Americans had not dawdled for two years before starting the Manhattan Project, and the atom bomb had actually been available to the Allies in 1943?
And what about the Netherlands in 1944? What if Hitler had been unable to profit from the three-month respite provided him by Walcheren? Or if the Allies had won the Battle of Arnhem and been able to race across the almost defenceless German lowlands to Berlin in autumn 1944? There would have been no starvation that winter in the Netherlands, no offensive in the Ardennes, Anne Frank would have become a great writer, and at Yalta Stalin would never have been in a position to claim all of Eastern Europe. But could the British and Americans really have driven on so much further after a breakthrough at Arnhem, without sufficient fuel, without a good chain of supply from Antwerp? Wouldn't they have choked on their own success once again? What if …
By chance, Winrich Behr, now a major on Field Marshal Model's staff, was there at the start of the Battle of Arnhem. ‘Our headquarters were at Hotel Hartenstein, in Oosterbeek. It was a lovely, quiet Sunday, we were having lunch, and suddenly we heard machine guns and the loud buzzing of planes. One of our superiors had the soup spoon shot out of his hand. I went outside and couldn't believe my eyes: floating gently down out of the sky were paratroopers. At first I thought it was a British special commando team out to liquidate a couple of generals. But the landing was so huge that I soon realised that this was something very different.’
Today there are still rumors that Operation Market Garden was betrayed to the Germans beforehand. According to Winrich Behr, no such information ever reached the German command: ‘The simple fact is that we were sitting there, the whole general staff. That I was sitting there calmly, eating an egg.’ The problem, Behr says, lay with the Allies: they simply had too little information. ‘The British didn't know that there were a couple of SS armoured divisions at Arnhem. From what I heard later, the Dutch resistance had reported that, but Montgomery didn't trust their information; he thought we had infiltrated the resistance. Actually, our armoured divisions were there by accident. They had fought in Normandy, and then been sent to Arnhem to rest up and repair their equipment. But they were soldiers with experience at the front. And they went into action right away.’
Today, the most important landing field is covered in corn and the occasional sunflower. It was here that they came down on that lovely Sunday afternoon of 17 September, 1944, those thousands of paratroopers, those countless gliders full of infantrymen, that entire overwhelming aerial caravan some 400 kilometres long. And over there, across from the Albert Heijn supermarket in Oosterbeek, close to the patio of restaurant Schoonoord, beside the Gall & Gall off-licence and Klimop florists, is where there were mowed down.
Market Garden was one of the most daring operations of the war. After all the delays that followed the landing at Normandy, the Allies were attempting, in one great, whirlwind push from Eindhoven, by way of Veghel and Nijmegen, to cross the Rhine at Arnhem, at a place the Germans least expected it. Thousands of American, British and Polish paratroopers were to secure the many bridges along the way, to allow the British tanks to roll through virtually unchallenged. The Americans of the 82nd Airborne Division were to take the Waal Bridge at Arnhem; the British of the 1st Airborne, along with a Polish brigade, would see to the nearby Rhine Bridge. The road to Berlin would then be cleared: the Allies could be there before winter came.
This winner-take-all initiative was hatched by Montgomery, but the plan soon received the wholehearted support of Eisenhower. ‘I not only approved of Market Garden, I insisted on it,’ he admitted to Stephen Ambrose twenty years later. All of the Allies’ precious fuel was directed northwards for the sake of Arnhem. General Patton, whose tanks were poised to break through at Nancy and Metz, had to wait. The plan was daring, and at the same time extremely complex, a chain of minor and major military actions that had to be closely coordinated and succeed without exception. If one link in the chain failed, the entire operation could fall apart. Here, more than in any supposed betrayal, lay the core of the failure of the Battle of Arnhem: in the risks the Allies took, and in the flush of optimism and nonchalance with which the plans were then carried out.
To start with, the advance of the Allied tanks from Eindhoven went much slower than expected. The Germans – and particularly those parts of the 15th Army the Allies had allowed to slip away at Antwerp – put up fierce resistance. Only with great difficulty could the Waal Bridge at Nijmegen be taken and held long enough to cross. At Arnhem, however, things went wrong. The British in their haste had taken the wrong radio transmitters with them, effectively cutting off all contact with headquarters and with each other. The consequences of this technical blunder alone were catastrophic. Furthermore, and inexplicably, the hardened American paratroopers were dropped at relatively easy positions, while the inexperienced British of the 1st Airborne Division were faced with the toughest job. Even their German foes noticed that. Winrich Behr: ‘The Brits just lay there, along the lines of: what do we do now? Their radios didn't work, their plan wasn't working either, and then they proved unable to improvise. They fought bravely, no doubt about that, but they didn't seem very experienced to us.’
The 10,000-plus men of the 1st Airborne had not been counting on any serious resistance. Their commanders should have known better. On the basis of decoded Enigma reports, the British Ultra project had concluded that the Germans were planning to send their 9th and 10th armoured divisions to the surroundings of ‘Venloo, Arnheim and Hertogenbusch’ for ‘rest and recuperation’. Yet this was put aside. When the information officer reporting to the commander of Operation Market Garden, Lieutenant General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, showed his commander aerial photos confirming the presence of the armoured divisions in the area, Browning sent the man on leave. His paratroopers received absolutely no warning. The only overt protest came from the experienced Polish airborne general, Stanislaw Sosabowski. He considered the plan outright suicide. ‘These Brits had never seen a German,’ was how he typified the mood within the army staff.
Fatal risks were taken as well with regard to the location of the landing. According to the original plan, most of the gliders and paratroopers would land close to the bridge. At the last moment, however, for security reasons, a landing spot was chosen on the other side of Arnhem, some fourteen kilometres from the objective. As a result, the airborne troops first had to fight their way through Oosterbeek and Arnhem before taking the bridge, while at the same time securing their landing spot for any reinforcements that might follow. Their firepower, to use the military parlance, was simply too limited for that.
In and around Arnhem the troops fought with a courage born of desperation, and sometimes with remarkable chivalry as well. For example: when the British headquarters beside the bridge, with its cellar full of wounded men, had been shelled, the medics arranged a ceasefire; the Germans, working side by side with the British, dragged the wounded men out of the burning building. Then the fighting resumed. Sosabowski's courageous Poles were deployed only after four days of fighting. They landed across the Rhine at Driel, under murderous German fire. From there, in heavy fighting, they succeeded in keeping the most important escape routes open for the trapped British troops.
After the defeat, it was this same Sosabowski who served as Browning and Montgomery's scapegoat. The general ended his life as a worker in a British factory.
On this quiet Sunday I drive through Oosterbeek. Hotel Hartenstein is still there, as are many other legendary locations. Around the old parsonage lies a splendid vegetable garden, a paradise of cabbage, beans, lettuce, blackberries, currants and flowers. In 1944 this was the home of Jan and Kate ter Horst, a couple with four youngsters and a baby, but still involved up to their ears in the resistance. While Kate stayed in the cellar with the children, amid the roar of machine guns, Sten guns and field mortars, their home accommodated more than 300 wounded men. Kate was referred to respectfully as ‘the Lady’, she was a paragon of calm and bravery, she talked about the future of a free Holland while holes were being shot in the parsonage walls, and she comforted the boys with a Psalm: ‘Thou shall not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.’
She herself wrote: ‘They are all dying, and must they breathe their last amid such a hurricane? God, give us a moment's silence, give us rest – even if only for a moment, so they can die in peace …’ When the battle was over, fifty-seven soldiers were buried in her garden. Of more than 10,000 Britons and Poles who landed at Arnhem, almost 1,500 were killed and 3,000 were wounded.
Today the river rolls slowly past the green forelands, the cows lie in the shade of trees, the occasional barge passes, then a few geese honking in flight. There is an old church amid the greenery. Every once in a while, a yellow train goes thundering across the railway bridge.
It was hard for Winrich Behr to talk about autumn 1944. He could not really remember, he said, how he had thought about it at the time. He had talked and read too much about it afterwards. Rommel was wounded during an air raid, and soon afterwards died quite unexpectedly, on 14 October, 1944. As the representative of his army unit, Behr came to the funeral with a wreath. ‘I'll never forget it. General Rundstedt gave a horribly hypocritical address. An old acquaintance, an officer from the Paris parade committee, had organised the entire funeral. That evening we agreed to meet in a café. There he told me the true story: how Hitler had sent two generals to Rommel, how they had accused him of complicity in Stauffenberg's assassination attempt and said that he, because of his exemplary service record, was to be allowed to choose between being executed and having his family sent to a concentration camp, or committing suicide with a fast-working poison, a military pension for his family and a state funeral. ‘It was nothing but a filthy business,’ he said. So you can imagine that, after that, we of the Western staff couldn't really summon up much enthusiasm for our planned offensives.’
