by John Nichol
In Oosterbeek, in the eastern part of the Netherlands, the German presence was minimal compared with the occupied cities in the west of the country. A few soldiers were billeted in requisitioned homes; a heavy hand hardly seemed necessary with the border of the Reich just a dozen or so miles away. Here you could still, to some extent, get on with your life and try to ignore the ugliness of the bigger picture. Anje and her friends from school were free to play in the streets and woods near her home – ‘hide and seek, that sort of thing, football, tennis and hockey, of course, normal children’s games, amidst the war’. Yet the occupation was still an unforgivable affront. Older people might be more accommodating, playing a longer, subtler game, but young people like her were deeply resentful of the Germans. ‘We’d hear the soldiers singing in the streets – our streets – and that made me very angry. I thought they were monsters. We couldn’t go to the cinema, to the theatre or to concerts because that’s where the Germans were. The films, everything, were in German. I hated it.’
There were more Moffen encamped just a mile or so along the road to the east in neighbouring Arnhem – of which affluent Oosterbeek and its handful of streets and comfortable hotels was increasingly an overspill, a suburb. Centuries-old Arnhem, with its pretty squares, parks and large houses, was a solid place, rooted in the past but with a purpose in the present as the provincial capital and administrative centre of Gelderland.4 It had thrived in the Middle Ages as a trading city, been fought over by dukes and emperors and was, by the twentieth century, established as a quiet, genteel place among whose magnificent greenery Dutch merchants liked to retire to live out their old age in comfortable, bourgeois splendour. It possessed the refined atmosphere of Richmond or Bath, but with the strategic importance of its position on the Rhine.
The Rhine was many things: a vital line of communication, a border, a barrier, a battleground. But, more than anything, this ancient waterway was a potent German symbol. It fed myths and legends of gods and maidens and Teutonic knights as it rose in the Swiss Alps some 750 miles away, passed through wooded gorges, beneath cliff-top castles and by medieval trading towns, then poured through industrial cities such as Cologne and Düsseldorf. Berlin was Germany’s capital, Bavaria its spiritual home, but the Rhineland was its heart and its powerhouse. Along the way the river picked up tributaries – the Neckar, the Main, the Mosel, the Ruhr – before, wide and fast flowing, it crossed out of Germany and into the Netherlands.
There, it divided for the last leg to the North Sea. The main river took a southerly route and, renamed the Waal, rushed towards Nijmegen and on towards the coast. The lesser stream meandered to the north, into Arnhem, under the town’s massive road bridge – the only one for miles – and then past Oosterbeek’s wide, grassy banks, where locals came to swim in its muddy waters, before rolling down to the estuary at Rotterdam. This was the Neder Rijn, the Lower Rhine, and to Anje and her friends it was their adolescent playground. ‘We would bathe in the Rhine or paddle around in canoes. I swam all the way across’ – it was a quarter of a mile there and back at this point – ‘a couple of times because there was an orchard on the other side where we could pick cherries.’ In the autumn of 1944, though, it would be the scene of an epic battle that would add a new chapter of courage and self-sacrifice to the rolling Rhine’s never-ending story.
Back in 1940, the Netherlands had fallen quickly to the invading Germans. Without warning, the Third Reich’s paratroopers had dropped from the skies to grab vital bridges over the country’s extensive rivers and canals, its panzer divisions poured across the border and its Stuka dive-bombers flattened Rotterdam. Flooding the country, the Netherlanders’ traditional defence against invaders, didn’t work. It was all over in six days. There was little comfort for the Dutch as Belgium and France also succumbed to the Nazi juggernaut. The swastika flew unchallenged over northern Europe, leaving Britain huddling behind the Channel to stand alone. British defiance then and over the coming years was an inspiration, especially when the RAF began taking the fight to Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and a host of other German cities. Squadrons of bomb-laden Wellingtons and Lancasters flew high over Holland on their way eastwards. Below, the Dutch would peep from behind locked doors and shuttered windows and hug themselves with delight. ‘At night, we’d hear the bombers overhead and just be pleased to know that someone at least was trying to fight the Germans,’ Anje recalled. ‘Those planes were a sound of hope from overseas.’ But they put lives at risk if the raids came too close to home. ‘I was at school in Arnhem, right next to the bridge, when one day Nijmegen, 10 miles to the south of us, was bombed. We all hid under the tables. The noise was incredible and we were really scared.’ It was a sign that, though liberation would come for certain one day, it might not be won easily or without pain.
The successful D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 – news of which the Dutch heard as they crouched around illicit wirelesses and crystal sets – raised any flagging spirits. Then, after weeks of tough fighting to crack stiff enemy resistance to their advance, the Allies broke through and roared across France and Belgium, chasing the German army ‘like a hunt after a fox on a glorious spring day’, as one historian put it.5 Paris was liberated, then Brussels. The Germans were in full retreat, whole armies speeding eastwards for the safety of the Rhine and the fortified Siegfried Line. The Netherlanders waited for their turn, anxious to be free too. September came, full of hope, speculation, expectation. But anticipation was to be avoided at all costs. Defy the jittery occupying Germans too openly and too early, and disaster could strike. Rumour was deadly dangerous if it ran too far ahead of reality. But defiance was undoubtedly growing, and an encouraging message was passed by radio from London that Prince Bernhard, son-in-law of the exiled Queen Wilhelmina, had been appointed commander-in-chief of the so-called ‘Dutch Forces of the Interior’, the Resistance army. With this came a plea for everyone to stay calm. ‘We have to wait for the prince’s orders,’ fifteen-year-old Marie-Anne, another of Oosterbeek’s young inhabitants, confided to her diary.6
For all this apparent caution, early in September the nation lost its patience and its self-control in what was ever after known as Dolle Dinsdag – Mad Tuesday. The word spread that Antwerp, the Belgian port on the Scheldt estuary, had fallen to the Allies. The door into Holland had been flung open, or so it seemed. ‘We’re next’ was the thought in everyone’s mind. In the cities, patriotic orange flags appeared in windows and crowds gathered in the streets, encouraged by the sight of the German military hurriedly packing. Bonfires blazed in the courtyards of official buildings as the occupiers destroyed piles of secret documents, a precursor, it seemed, to leaving. Members of the NSB, the SS force formed from Dutch Nazis, prepared to disappear before they paid for their collaborating misdeeds at the end of a lynch mob’s rope. At Oosterbeek, an excited Anje was swept along by the tide of hope. ‘I talked to my friends about how we’d soon be free. And the boys would come home – my brothers and my boyfriend Rob, who was in hiding in the north and whom I hadn’t seen for two years.’ She climbed with her family to the roof of their house and stared into the distance, straining to see British soldiers. ‘Where are the Tommies?’ they asked each other.
The answer – though, on that Oosterbeek rooftop, the van Maanens had no means of knowing it – was that the Allied ground forces were between 60 and 70 miles away. The British Second Army – commanded by General Miles Dempsey and part of Montgomery’s 21st Army Corps – was strung out along the southern bank of the Meuse-Escaut canal, which formed the border between liberated Belgium and the still-occupied Netherlands. It had come to a halt. After the breakneck canter from Normandy, it had run out of steam – steam and, more importantly, supplies. The port of Antwerp was in Allied hands all right, as all those wildfire Dutch rumours had said. But the rest of the Scheldt estuary giving access to the North Sea was not. The shores continued to be held by the Germans, and there was no way for relief ships to get into the docks and wharves of Antwerp past their big gu
ns. The over-extended Allies were left still tied umbilically to the French port of Cherbourg, 350 miles away, as the sole entry point into Europe for desperately needed re-supplies of equipment, guns, ammunition, food: everything. Thousands of laden trucks – the Red Ball Express, as the largely American drivers called themselves – trundled northwards from Cherbourg in convoy, moving as fast as they could to feed the front line, then turned round and went back for more. But the distances were getting longer and the logistics tougher all the time. The onward rush was grinding to a halt, and serious consideration was given to the next step.
The obvious military move was to backtrack, go west not east, crush the Germans dug in along the Scheldt, open up Antwerp to shipping, ease the supply chain, then resume the drive eastwards to Germany. But that would be costly, in manpower and time. And the impetus would be lost. On the other hand, standing there on the Meuse-Escaut canal and looking at a map of what lay ahead, the German border seemed tantalizingly near, almost within reach. And wide open. If only the Allied armies could race through Holland as they had raced through France and Belgium, then they would be round the enemy’s line of fortifications, in by the back door and on their way to Berlin. There was a problem, of course, with all those Low Countries waterways. If each canal, stream and river had to be assaulted one by one, the Allies might end up stalled and stymied as they had been for so long by the narrow lanes and high hedges of Normandy. Control of the bridges would be crucial, making sure they were captured intact before the retreating Germans demolished them. Allied commanders paused for thought.
Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, life for the locals became harder and more dangerous as the occupying German forces reacted to the enemy at the gate not by running – as, for a while, everyone had thought certain – but by regaining their nerve and cracking down on every hint of opposition. After Mad Tuesday, a state of emergency was proclaimed and a dire warning given that groups of more than five people gathering in the streets were liable to be shot. Curfew was brought forward to 8 p.m. Normal life virtually ceased. Trains stopped running, the mail didn’t get through, the phones went dead. Food was scarce, ration books pointless. Individuals were grabbed at gunpoint in the cities to dig shelters and defensive trenches. Even worse, men were routinely abducted for transportation to be slave labour in Germany. Now it was not just the young and the fit with reason to fear the round-up. All males under fifty were at risk, picked up at random on the streets or winkled out from their homes in brutal house-to-house searches. Suddenly, liberation was more desperately needed than ever.
At Oosterbeek, the once quiet village was filling up with retreating German soldiers demanding billets in people’s homes, requisitioning the school for a depot, erecting anti-aircraft guns in the meadows. Their manners were brusque and threatening. Marie-Anne thought them ‘tiresome’ and ‘vulgar’. A Feldwebel [sergeant] marched into her garden and demanded to inspect her father’s bicycle workshop. When she got back from a trip to the shops – ‘You queue for hours and then at the butcher’s I get 5ozs of meat, for the six of us! We won’t grow fat on that lot’ – he was not only still there but had taken charge. The workshop had been cleared out and converted into a field kitchen for his platoon. She wanted to object, ‘but the time has not yet come that we can ignore what the “Herren” order us to do.’ Everywhere there were signs that the situation was worsening. ‘In the afternoon I went across the river to get some pears. The ferry is now guarded by the SS.’
Confrontation and hostility were in the air and violence not far behind, as the 22-year-old Heleen Kernkamp discovered. She had left her job in Amsterdam and was in Arnhem, her home town, staying with friends from her schooldays. Two of them had jobs in a large local plastics factory, the biggest employer in the town, whose bosses were ordered by the Germans to provide a workforce to dig trenches. The patriotic Dutch directors bravely refused to comply. Instead, they shut down the factory and gave their workers six weeks’ pay, enough for those who felt threatened to go into hiding. ‘The tension in Arnhem was tremendous,’ she recalled. People locked themselves away at home, trying to hide their menfolk. The streets were deserted, except for the Germans stripping the factory. Massive machines were dismantled to be carted off to Germany. The Dutch were dismayed. Their loss would be a terrible blow to the local economy, to jobs and livelihoods. But what could they do to prevent this ransacking of the town’s assets? On the night of 15 September, a local resistance group blew up a railway viaduct to delay the machinery being taken away. The Germans retaliated. Posters appeared warning that if the perpetrators were not found, an unspecified number of civilians would be taken hostage and summarily executed. ‘We discussed these reprisals all day long. Who would they take? How many?’ The deadline was noon on 17 September. Arnhem and its people were desperate and afraid. A massacre seemed unavoidable. ‘We hardly slept that night, fearing what the next day would bring.’ The salvation they dreamt of was to come from a totally unexpected direction – out of the sky.
Two hundred miles away, across the North Sea, thousands of men were preparing to liberate Arnhem. The training was behind them, the briefings had been given. Now it was a case of maintaining morale and comradeship at a pitch where they would go into battle without flinching. Bombardier Leo Hall, a radio signaller, and his mates were let out of camp in Lincolnshire to go to the cinema. He could never recall anything about the film they saw, not even its name or who was in it, but the blistering march back to barracks, with full-throated voices belting out the bawdy words of ‘The Big Flywheel’ in unison like naughty boys – ‘Round and round went the bloody great wheel/ In and out went the p**** of steel’ – released some of the tension, took their thoughts away from what lay ahead. Paratrooper James Sims, on the other hand, well remembered what he’d watched on the silver screen that night – Hellzapoppin’, an American song-and-dance funny starring comedians Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson – and thought it ‘the funniest film I’d ever seen’.7 He also remembered the rows of military police lining the auditorium to make sure no one got cold feet and tried to do a runner. Near his base, another paratrooper, Andy Milbourne, downed pints in the pub as his platoon went through the extensive repertoire of ghoulish para songs, from ‘He Ain’t Gonna Jump No More’ to ‘Three Cheers for the Next Man to Die’. Beer and bravado steadied the nerves as the 1st Airborne Division prepared to leapfrog into Europe.
Airborne troops represented one of the Second World War’s ground-breaking new weapons. Technologically, this global conflict was revolutionary in many ways – the long-distance bomber, submarines, rockets and the atom bomb among them. But the one device that really came into its own was the parachute, floating down from the skies with an armed, aggressive infantryman on the end of it. Germany led the way with its Fallschirmjäger, parachutists dropping behind the lines to great effect in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Crete. Ironically, the heavy losses sustained in Crete persuaded Hitler that airborne attacks were over-extravagant and unnecessary and he put a stop to their widespread use. But Britain, by then, had seized on the airborne idea, egged on by the personal intervention of prime minister Winston Churchill, who delighted in shock tactics to bamboozle an enemy and take him by surprise.
The Parachute Regiment was founded as a small, elite force to carry out hit-and-run raids, then expanded (though still very much an elite) to become a full-on attacking force, a spearhead to thrust into the heart of the enemy, ahead of the main force. The training was tough, the risk and adrenaline levels high. Only the bravest need apply. Only the best were recruited. To be qualified to wear the red beret set a man apart. ‘We were lauded as super-fit and super-daring,’ recalled Leo Hall. ‘We turned heads in our comings and goings. Though generally from working-class backgrounds, we became an aristocracy.’ As Allied paras,8 both British and American, led the invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, they proved their worth as impact players, making a vital difference to the outcome of battle. They also had back-up in the 1st Airlanding Bri
gade, whose gliders provided an additional means of back-door entry into enemy territory. Towed to enemy air space by ‘tugs’ and then cut loose to coast down, they could carry not only infantry but heavy equipment as well, including jeeps and small tanks. Once on the ground, paratroopers generally had just their own two feet for transport. Gliders were a means to increased mobility – to hitting further and faster. The men and machines they carried were, in effect, the airborne cavalry.
At the D-Day landings, troops of the 6th Airborne, one of the British army’s two airborne divisions, were in the vanguard. Just before the Allied infantry stormed on to the beaches of Normandy, parachutists dropped inland to knock out the gun batteries which dominated the cliff-tops. Meanwhile, brilliantly flown gliders landed just yards from a canal bridge vital to the advance inland, enabling the troops on board to capture it. Strategically, these were vital missions. If either had failed, so too might the entire enterprise. There was every chance of the Allied army being pushed back into the sea. The men of the 6th demonstrated in full the impact of airborne on the modern battlefield. Three and a half months later, there seemed no reason to doubt that a similar smash-and-grab operation could be repeated, with equally devastating results, this time to seize bridges over the wide and muddy waters of the Rhine in the Netherlands.
The plan was the brainchild of Montgomery – the hero of El Alamein and the Western Desert – and was remarkably daring for this habitually meticulous military planner. But he had a point to prove. His recent promotion from general to field marshal was the clue to his state of mind – the enhanced rank was a personal and political sop concocted by Churchill and the king to divert attention from the fact that he had lost overall control of the land forces in Europe to the American supreme commander, General Dwight ‘Ike’ Eisenhower. He was also losing the argument among the Allies about how best to defeat Hitler. Eisenhower wanted a broad-front attack on Germany, his armies ranged from north to south and advancing in tandem as they pushed towards the Rhine, sweeping all before them. But Monty, contemptuous of the Americans – he thought Eisenhower pedestrian and unfit to command – believed this approach slow and cumbersome. Every yard would be a battle. The Germans would have time and opportunity to re-group their defences. Certain of his own pre-eminence as a military leader, his preference now was for a single rapid strike, concentrating forces on one weak spot and thundering through the enemy lines. ‘One really powerful and full-blooded thrust towards Berlin is likely to get there and thus end the German war,’ he lectured Eisenhower in a communiqué at the beginning of September. ‘[But] if we attempt a compromise solution and split our resources so that no thrust is full-blooded, we will prolong the war.’9
