by John Nichol
Arnhem
John Nichol
Tony Renell
In September 1944, a mighty shock force of battle hardened Allied troops dropped from the skies into enemy-occupied Holland in what was hoped would be the decisive final battle of World War II. Landing miles behind the German lines, their daring mission was to secure bridges across the Rhine so that ground forces could make a rapid dash into Nazi Germany. If all went well, the war could be over by Christmas.
But what many trusted would be a simple operation turned into a brutal losing battle. Of 12,000 British airborne soldiers, 1,500 died and 6,000 were taken prisoner. The vital bridge at Arnhem they had come to capture stayed resolutely in German hands.
But though this was a bitter military defeat for the Allies, beneath the humiliation was another story — of heroism and self-sacrifice, gallantry and survival, guts and determination unbroken in the face of impossible odds.
In the two-thirds of a century that have passed since then, historians have endlessly analysed what went wrong and squabbled over who was to blame. Lost in the process was that other Arnhem story — the triumph of the human spirit, as seen through the dramatic first-hand accounts of those who were there, in the cauldron, fighting for their lives, fighting for their comrades, fighting for their honour, a battle they won hands down.
John Nichol and Tony Renell
ARNHEM
The Battle for Survival
For Sophie and Harry
This book is dedicated to all those Arnhem veterans, military and civilian, who fought with such incredible courage and selfless dedication. Their fortitude in the face of overwhelming odds is an inspiration to us all.
‘I will not say that Arnhem was a defeat. Such men as they can never be defeated. They fought till they had nothing left to fight with – and then fought on.’
– Dick Ennis, glider pilot
Maps
MAP 1
The Allied Advance to the Dutch Border, 1944
MAP 2
Operation Market Garden: The Overall Plan
MAP 3
The Battle for Arnhem and Oosterbeek
MAP 4
The Battle for the Bridge
MAP 5
Oosterbeek – the Defensive Perimeter
Preface
The well-manicured lawn runs down to the Thames near Abingdon. Pleasure boats cruise by and families are out enjoying the sunshine on this glorious midsummer day in tranquil southern England. But the thoughts of 89-year-old Peter Clarke – whose home this is – are of a different river and a different, troubled time. As he remembers faces and places, his eyes mist and he is on the banks of the Lower Rhine in the Netherlands, two thirds of a century ago. He is back among the brave and the bellicose, the wounded and the weary, the dead and the dying, in Arnhem. It was here that in September 1944 a shock force of British troops dropped from the skies into enemy-occupied Holland in what was hoped would be the decisive final battle of the Second World War. It was the most daring of raids behind German lines. If all went well, the war would be over by Christmas.
The strategy was simple enough. In an effort to speed up the defeat of Hitler’s already retreating armies, twelve thousand British and Polish airborne troops flew many miles into Nazi-held Europe and descended from planes and gliders on the Dutch city of Arnhem, close to the German border, to capture and defend its vital bridge over the Rhine. Within forty-eight hours, a fast-moving column of armour from the British Second Army would arrive overland along a corridor it carved through the German lines, sweep over that bridge and on into Germany through what was in effect the open back door. That was the plan. But the mission went wrong, the reinforcements never arrived and the airborne forces were left isolated. What began as an audacious masterstroke to end the war became a desperate struggle for survival itself. Surrounded, outgunned and running out of supplies, these brave men fought for a week and more in Arnhem and in Oosterbeek, a pretty village in wooded countryside nearby.
Every street was a war zone, every stand of trees a fortress. Every inch was contested; casualties were enormous, on both sides. But in this furnace a legend was forged – of bravery and endurance far beyond the simple call of duty. Even the remorseless enemy admired what the Red Devils of the Airborne Division did at Arnhem. ‘You fought well, Tommy,’ many a German soldier told the six and a half thousand who were finally forced to capitulate, long past the point when they could have honourably surrendered and only when they could fight no more.
Here, in the company of the thoughtful and gentle Peter Clarke, a retired solicitor, it is a leap of the imagination to see him as a young staff sergeant fighting for his life and for those of his comrades as they huddled inside their diminishing redoubts. He is uneasy as we gently tap his memories. ‘I remember very little of that time, nothing almost,’ he says at first. But it’s impossible to hold back the past, especially events that were so brutal and so intense, so grand in scale and yet so deeply personal that they can never be erased. There are long pauses in our conversation as if he is reloading the tape, revisiting the horrors and finding himself as affected now as he was sixty-six years ago. ‘Everything melded into one,’ he says. ‘There are no separate days, no separate nights. I don’t remember morning or afternoon or evening.’
The images come tumbling out. ‘I recall a haystack that caught fire, throwing light all around the darkness and giving our position away. I was in a slit trench on the edge of a wood. There were trees behind and to the sides but in front it was wide open. I felt completely vulnerable. And then the German mortars were screaming in and all you can do is crouch down in your dug-out and hope and pray. Oh, I was scared when they were mortaring us. I remember my knees knocking. You’re under constant attack. I don’t remember any times of respite. But we just got on with it. There were no orders, there was nobody running from trench to trench saying do this, look in this direction. You were out there on your own, you made your own rules, you made your own decisions.’ And yet, for all he had to endure, he feels privileged to have played a part and to have given so much of himself for a cause he passionately believed in – the defeat of Hitler and Nazism.
Time is taking its toll on his unique generation of fighting men. Ron Brooker, the same age as Peter Clarke, was a sharp-shooter in his Arnhem days. Now his eyes are dimming. ‘I used to be quite a marksman,’ he laments, ‘but I can’t see a bloody thing these days.’ He’s a cheery soul, neighbours pop in all the time, and, as with Peter Clarke, we have to remind ourselves that this is a man who stood toe to toe with SS soldiers. ‘This was close-quarter killing with bullet and bayonet,’ he says. ‘It was brutal. I think I had every six-foot soldier in the German army coming through the windows!’ He draws a map of Arnhem on a scrap of paper to illustrate where he was at this moment or that. He has precious mementoes to share – the letters his mother sent to him and the ones he wrote to her from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, the War Office telegram his parents received telling them he was missing in action. As he shoves them back into a battered brown envelope, his eyes look damp with emotion.
On his walls are paintings that depict those glory days – ‘the best time of my life’. In one, a figure is standing amidst shattered buildings, and he can recall with photographic clarity how he was firing his rifle across that very scene. He is still haunted by the possibility that he accidentally shot one of his own side. It was all too easy in the chaos of intense and isolated actions along the constantly shifting and re-shaping front line. That chaos makes it hard to unravel the complex manoeuvrings of the twin and concurrent actions at Arnhem and Oosterbeek, and we have not attempted to reconstruct the battle in this way. Besides, one of the significant features of Arnhem was how the tidy pieces of military organization – th
e brigade, company and platoon structures – were swept aside by events and men fought shoulder to shoulder with those next to them, whatever the colour of their beret or the badge on their smock. This was no orderly set-piece battle, no neat chessboard of attack and defence. Rather it was a maze and a muddle, the confusing interweaving of a myriad of separate actions. Times and places merged and plotting one’s way can be as difficult as navigating the currents of the Rhine proved to be. It is easy to drown in detail.
But here, in this book, it is the grander and more glorious picture we re-create – the drama of individual men fighting on when all seemed lost, glued together by hope and comradeship. Those who led and directed them – the politicians, the generals, the brigadiers, even the colonels – are bit players in our narrative. They are the context (and important for that) but not the content. This is essentially the story of ordinary men – the likes of Peter Clarke and Ron Brooker, heroes all, though, with the modesty typical of their generation, they deny the very suggestion. You will also find here not only the battle-hardened professional infantrymen of the parachute brigades but others whose contributions are often overlooked – the sappers and the signallers, the pilots and the medics, the padres and the Poles. To those readers steeped in the Arnhem story, some of these figures will be familiar, but others are new, with untold tales to tell. What they have in common is that they can all say with hand on heart, ‘I was there.’
Being there was crucial. It is strongly felt by Arnhem men – more so perhaps than in any other Second World War battle – that to have any real grasp of what it was like to live and die in that cauldron, you had to have experienced it. That is why their own accounts are at the heart of this narrative and much of this story is rightly in their words. What we hear is the authentic voice of Arnhem and Oosterbeek, with all the horror laid bare and the heroism revealed. That goes for the brave Dutch people too, men, women and children risking the Gestapo knock on the door to try to protect the Tommies who had come to free them. One of the often overlooked tragedies of Arnhem is that they were left to make the best of a bad job when the mission failed and suffered grievously for it.
Courage apart, what also makes the Arnhem story so enduring is its resonance. It echoes many of the memorable battles of history. A small band of elite soldiers defies immensely superior odds, just as the Spartans did at Thermopylae and the English at Agincourt. There is all the do-or-die drama of the sieges at the Alamo and Rorke’s Drift, plus gruesome trench warfare in the rain and mud that has hints of the Somme and Ypres. As for the fierce hand-to-hand fighting house by house, this was nothing short of a mini-Stalingrad. Those nine concentrated days at Arnhem had all those elements and more. They also encompassed every shade of human emotion – hope, fear, love, loyalty, disappointment, grief, regret. But never – and this is what was remarkable – despair.
Yes, Arnhem was a defeat. What many trusted would be a simple operation turned into a brutal losing battle with terrible losses. Of those airborne soldiers sent on this ill-fated mission, 1,500 died and 6,500 were taken prisoner. The vital bridge at Arnhem that they had come to capture stayed resolutely in German hands. The war was not over by Christmas. In the end, as one anonymous paratrooper put it, ‘Courage was not enough.’
But undefeated courage is what we record here – the courage of the blood-soaked, bandaged para who, when asked how he was, replied, ‘Except for shrapnel in my arm, a leg missing and a splitting headache, I think I’m okay.’ And it is the unbroken human spirit that we celebrate – the mortar sergeant who, with a wry smile, declared to his mates on their way into captivity, ‘Look, chaps, we may have lost the battle but we did come in second.’
1. ‘Where are the Tommies!’
As Arthur Ayers slipped into a fitful sleep in his army billet in eastern England in September 1944, he tried not to think about tomorrow. Reveille would sound at 5.30 a.m., and then he would be going into action with thousands of other British soldiers of the 1st Airborne Division. Weighed down with weapons and supplies, they would cram into hundreds of planes and gliders already lined up at a dozen airfields, fly 200 miles from the safe shores of England, and land 70 miles behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied northern Europe. Ayers, a sapper, was philosophical about his own survival, as most fighting men are on the eve of battle. ‘If you’re going to die, there’s nothing you can do about it,’ he told himself, ‘so there’s no point worrying.’
Instead, he directed his mind to loving thoughts of Lola. She was his wife of just a few weeks, theirs one of those ‘marry me quick’ romances that the special circumstances of wartime encouraged. He had spotted the vivacious eighteen-year-old redhead in her smart ATS uniform at the tea bar in a Woolworth store and knew instantly she was the one for him. His mates had gone over to chat while he held back, too shy to speak. But he wrote to her, his first letter a complete shot in the dark – he sent it care of that Woolworth’s tea bar, where a friend of hers was working. Lola got sick – a bout of TB – Arthur came to her hospital bedside, love blossomed. They didn’t wait. In those days, it was important to seize the moment, especially since he knew that, for airborne troops like him, a big military operation was in the offing and had been since D-Day in June. He got special permission from his CO for the wedding and the honeymoon, short and sweet in a bungalow near Brighton. ‘We didn’t talk about the possibility of me being killed. We just enjoyed life while we had it.’1 After five days as a husband he was back with his unit and now about to head over the North Sea to the Netherlands.
There was something of that same carpe diem spirit about the ambitious military operation he was embarking on. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the British army commander, had spotted an opportunity to end the war quickly and seized it. Fired up with optimism, he conceived this bold plan to deliver a surprise ‘left hook’ – his phrase – by-passing Germany’s static defences along the fortified Siegfried Line and punching into the heartland of the Nazi nation. Already on the run, the German army would be sent reeling; resistance would crumble. One big push now and the war Britain had been fighting and its weary citizens enduring since September 1939 could be over in a matter of weeks. A huge air armada had been hurriedly assembled, the biggest of the war, and the objective of the heavily armed strike force it was ferrying into battle was the German-held road bridge over the Rhine at the historic Dutch city of Arnhem, close to the border between the Netherlands and Germany. Win it and hold it until reinforcements arrived en masse over land and they would be striking a massive and decisive blow in the war to defeat Hitler.
Victory was within the Allies’ grasp, and soon. If all went well, there would be peace at last. Ayers would be reunited with his bride. The last-minute briefing at camp was reassuring. ‘From intelligence reports we have received,’ his company captain informed the eager young paratroopers lined up in ranks before him, ‘it seems there will be very little opposition at Arnhem, just a German brigade group and a few light tanks.’ In reality, what lay ahead was one of the toughest and hardest-fought battles of the Second World War. Ayers was one of the lucky ones. He would survive. But it would be a long time before he returned home.
Just hours before Ayers went to war, on a grassy water meadow beside the River Rhine, Anje van Maanen, a teenage Dutch girl from Oosterbeek, a well-to-do village just a few miles west of Arnhem, was playing hockey with her friends. It was the weekend. The day was sunny and warm. They were unaware of the hope and then the horror that were about to descend on them, changing their lives for ever. Finn, Anje’s dog, a lively Belgian Shepherd, was on the loose and interrupting their game with his antics. He grabbed the ball and ran off. Seventeen-year-old Anje, the local doctor’s daughter from the big house just off Oosterbeek’s main street, shrieked in irritation and delight as she chased after him, and wrestled the ball from his teeth. She tickled his black ears and stroked his head, and everyone laughed as the game got under way again. Such a nice day – friends, fun, fine weather, Finn. For a few precious moments you could a
lmost forget about the hated Moffen, the German soldiers who had been holding sway over Holland for four years and four months.
There were constant reminders of the harsh, humiliating realities of being a conquered nation – the fact that the hockey game was girls only, for example. Where were the boys? Most of those in their teens and twenties had gone into hiding – living ‘underwater’, as the flood-prone Dutch put it – to avoid being rounded up and transported in cattle trucks to Germany to work in tank and aircraft factories: slave labour to fuel Hitler’s increasingly overstretched war machine. Anje’s three brothers had disappeared into the ether to avoid being deported. Two had gone away, ‘but my youngest brother Paul, who was a medical student, was hiding in our house, up in a room in the attic. We had to be careful and not talk about him, even to friends. We couldn’t really trust other people.’2 Suspicion ruled everyone’s lives. A whispered word praising the Allies, a V-for-victory sign flashed with furtive fingers – such acts could be dangerous. Safety, survival even, lay in silence and invisibility.
Beneath their apparent acquiescence, the vast majority of the nation fumed. The total lack of freedom under the Nazi occupiers weighed heavily on Heleen Kernkamp, a trainee nurse working in an Amsterdam hospital. ‘What is allowed – but especially what is not allowed – is dictated by the authorities,’ she noted with bitterness. Food and clothing, curfew, the blackout were all minutely regulated and enforced. Wireless sets were strictly forbidden, bicycles confiscated, ‘to say nothing of arbitrary punishments and reprisals’.3
